By the time you read this, my 30s will be over. Who knows, perhaps my 40s will be over too, if you’re particularly late to the blog post.

Earlier today I was fondly reminiscing about my 30th birthday celebrations. We spent it at the Edinboro Castle in Camden, which I used to love. One of my closest friends flew over from Germany to surprise me. Many others came out to wish me well and buy me a drink. It was by all accounts a glorious evening.

Or was it?

On further inspection of my memory banks, I recalled that it was also the evening my girlfriend broke into my Facebook account and read through six years of archived messages to other women in search of evidence of my mental and emotional infidelity. While these messages were largely innocent and entirely predated her arrival, I nevertheless spent a significant portion of the evening stood outside on the phone trying to defend my past conduct.

It’s a funny thing about the human mind – our ability to instantly recall certain aspects of an experience while conveniently overlooking or misremembering others. My 30th birthday was, truth be told, an incredibly stressful night. Yet my memory of it is blissful, unblemished by the catastrophic consequences of my girlfriend’s digital intrusion (it will not surprise you to learn that we are no longer together, while I have also changed my Facebook password, and I no longer message other women).

I say truth be told, but is the above really true?

After all, if I was capable of misremembering the occasion in the first place, I must surely be similarly capable of misremembering the bit of the evening that I had formerly forgotten. Perhaps events did not unfold in the way I’ve described. I could be overlooking some sort of grievous action on my part that precipitated – indeed, necessitated – her investigative efforts. I just don’t remember, and sadly, she has blocked me from all popular communication channels. I could try contacting her via Truth Social, but she’s probably blocked me on that too.

One of the things we do more of as we get older is collective remembering – spending hours lost in reminiscences from yesteryear with our family or friends, piecing together stories that we each remember in part, but not in whole. It would be interesting to see how closely these rebuilt memories resemble the objective reality as it was at the time, or whether collective remembering is akin to a game of Chinese whispers (apologies if this is in any way offensive to Chinese people).

Then again, what is objective reality? If five people gathered in a park one Friday evening in 1997 to drink vodka and kick a football about, and no one else was present, whose version of events should we take as gospel? The park’s?

In case you’re wondering, yes, I do have a specific evening in mind. It ends with two of us sleeping in a tree, a memory which feels so distant, and frankly ridiculous, that it’s hard to imagine it’s true. But it is, I promise. Or at least, I think it is.

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash