Revisionist History

It isn’t gaslighting. It’s revisionist history. History of hours before, a day/days before, weeks before, months before, years before. And it’s not exactly rewritten. It’s not even erased. It somehow ceases to exist.

Everyone changes. Hopefully we learn, we grow, we change, evolve, we adapt. None of us stays exactly the same. Not unless we are dead. And even then, people’s understanding of us changes, evolves, as they learn more about us, particularly the things we attempted to keep hidden when we were alive. See: Alice Munro.

So what is this insistence on “the position I am taking now has always been my position”?

I was once in a relationship, perhaps more accurately described by the more recent terminology of ‘situationship’, where what the other person claimed to want, and claimed to have always wanted and to have been absolutely clear on, changed – sometimes every other week, sometimes weekly, sometimes day to day. One day it was friends, a few weeks later it was friends with benefits, and then when I established the boundary that we were either friends or in a relationship and so I wanted to some time and distance to establish clarity for myself, after less than two weeks they pushed past that boundary to insist that we talk – that that time had made clear to them how much they cared for me, how important I was, and they did want a relationship, followed by a brief period of that, followed by an overnight 180 degree change after which I was told ‘I was never interested in a relationship, and I told you that…’ followed by more ‘friends with benefits’ nonsense, which changed literally overnight to ‘I’ve never wanted to be anything but friends’…. They would change their position from one extreme to the other, literally overnight, and each time they took a position it was, according to them, the only position they had ever taken. And they weren’t gaslighting me – every time they took a position, whatever words they were saying, they absolutely believed what they were saying in that moment. When they said they had only ever wanted to be friends and that that was the only position they had ever taken they absolutely believed it, meant it – this was the absolute truth to them and any suggestion otherwise was mystifying to them. And days/weeks later when they would say they had always wanted a relationship, or days/weeks after that when they said they had only ever wanted a ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement… each time, whatever position they were taking in that moment, it was the absolute truth – and the only truth there had ever been. What had been said a day/days/a week/weeks before… it ceased to exist. Poof! The current truth was the only truth. The cognitive, emotional and psychological whiplash was mind-boggling. (Don’t ask why I went along with this nonsense – my self-esteem issues are a topic of conversation for therapy….) My point here is, this is hardly the only example that I have seen, and continue to see, across all aspects of life, relationships, society.

When I was a child, my father took great pride in having significantly left-of-centre politics. As I developed my own political leanings, preferences, beliefs, he seemed quite pleased that mine tended in the same direction. He was always up for debate, however, to ensure that the facts and reasoning were sound. As he has aged, his politics have moved steadily to the right. Mine have not. At a rather disastrous family cottage ‘vacation’ a couple of years ago, one of my brothers asked my father if he thought this migration to the right was an inevitable part of aging. My father’s response was pretty reasonable – he put forward that as we age, as we inevitably participate in the capitalist society we remain trapped in, doing reasonably well for oneself means accumulating capital. And the more capital you accumulate, the more you want to protect it. And an interest in protecting one’s capital by definition meant moving to the right politically.

I think this is essentially correct, although I would describe it differently. If you choose to centre your life on the accumulation of capital, rather than relationship – rather than community… then that’s all you’ve got. You don’t have people. You have money, and you have stuff. Money and stuff, they don’t love you and they don’t protect you. Sure, you can pay money to people and organizations in return for the service of ‘protecting’ you. But there really isn’t very much stopping them – neither people nor organizations – from not following through on their part of that bargain. So you are always at risk. The primary motivator here… is fear. And that is what that migration to the right is actually about, at it’s core – fear. It is the silent real life manifestation of a moment from an animated film about a lost fish: “Mine! Mine! Mine!”

But I digress.

My father is not in denial about his migration to the right. Thankfully he has never come close to going MAGA on us. That only makes me slightly less horrified by it. But at least he is honest – he fully admits that his position now is different than it was different a decade ago, than it was two or several decades ago.

Very few people are. Honest, I mean.

I have watched as friends, acquaintances, colleagues, from a range of places geographically, economically, socially, etc., have evolved politically, socially, etc. This is to be expected. We all change, adapt, develop, evolve.

What I find forever mystifying, however, is the position that “who I am now, what I believe now, is who I have always been.”

I have watched more than one person shift to the right over the years, when I remember clearly and distinctly the conversations about our entrenched and fervent politics of the left. The political figures we expressed not just disdain but outright disgust for. And now…. now it is like those conversations never happened. There has been no expression over the years, or at any point, of “you know, I’ve been thinking about it, and I have reconsidered/have changed my mind/my feelings have changed/may be changing…” There is only the position they are taking right now – and it is expressed as the only position they have ever taken. The political figures they have specifically expressed disdain if not disgust for in the past are now presented as reasonable and rational, people they support. It’s not even done through the lens of suggesting that this political figure has changed or evolved and therefore they can support and agree with them now – they are supporters with no acknowledgement that they have ever been anything else.

What is this insistence on “the position I am taking now has always been my position”?

Is it that we believe that in order to be right on something we must never have been wrong, and therefore if the position I take now is right/correct it has to have always been my position? How does that make any sense? To suggest that you have always been of this absolutely correct position is to suggest that you have never wrestled with any of the ideas you are supporting on an intellectual level – in which case, how do you know they are right?

It was recently suggested to me that this is a neurotypical versus neurodivergent thing. That neurotypical people have a much greater flexibility with regards to the ‘truth’ than folks who are neurodivergent. And therefore, NT folks have no problem shifting position to a brand new ‘truth’ with no acknowledgement of there ever having been a different one. Whereas ND folks cannot do this – we don’t have this kind of emotional/intellectual flexibility; for an ND person, it has to be “I used to think/believe X, but now I think/believe Y because…”. If this is accurate, I am not sure that it is the ND folks who are demonstrating a limitation. Because the past doesn’t change, doesn’t cease to exist, just because I have learned something that changes my understanding of the truth.

I have changed my mind almost endlessly on just about everything in life. Hopefully it’s because I am learning. But it might be because I am getting older and more afraid, or because my critical and analytical thinking skills are diminishing, or because I am just tired and some things are easier to believe, think, see, do.

I have been wrong, about a lot of things. There are things that I have misunderstood, misinterpreted, there are things that I am undoubtedly misunderstanding, misinterpreting – there are things I am undoubtedly wrong about now. I look forward to learning, to unlearning.

This does not diminsh who I am or what I have to contribute to any discussion. I would hope it would be exactly the contrary. But what do I know – given how often I have been entirely wrong in the past, that could very well be the case with regards to this.