Memory

Memory can be unreliable. Interpretation certainly is. Two people can experience the same interaction and leave with very different narratives about what happened.

What feels more meaningful to me now is paying attention to patterns that could have been observed by someone with no emotional investment. A quiet witness. A fly on the wall.

Not someone deciding who was right.

Just someone noticing what happened.

Here are some of the things I believe that fly on the wall would have seen.

They would have seen concerns met with defensive explanations more often than curiosity.

They would have seen hurt followed by rebuttal instead of repair.

They would have seen long conversations devoted to why my experience was inaccurate, exaggerated, unfair, or incomplete, while the original concern quietly disappeared.

They would have seen accountability flow much more comfortably in one direction than the other.

They would have seen apologies followed by explanations that softened or erased accountability.

They would have seen requests for change become deep dives into my shortcomings.

They would have seen conflict become a courtroom instead of a collaboration.

They would have seen me trying harder.

Communicating more carefully.

Choosing my words more precisely.

Waiting for better timing.

Trying different approaches.

Apologizing for trying so hard.

Hoping that one more adjustment on my part would finally create the relationship I believed was possible.

They would have seen moments of extraordinary warmth.

Humor.

Affection.

Thoughtfulness.

Hope.

Those moments were real.

They were also unpredictable.

And they were enough to keep me believing things could be different.

But they would have also seen those moments disappear without much explanation, leaving me searching for what had changed and what I needed to do differently to bring them back.

They would have seen important conversations postponed until they quietly disappeared.

Promises made in emotional moments but rarely translated into lasting change.

They would have seen responsibilities become negotiable when they belonged to him and urgent when they belonged to me.

They would have seen me begin monitoring his mood before bringing up difficult subjects.

Editing my feelings before sharing them.

Trying to predict which version of him I would be speaking to that day.

Eventually, the fly on the wall would have noticed something else.

The conversations were not reflective of two people trying to solve a problem together. But conversations about whether I had the right to have the problem in the first place.

Over time, that changed me.

I began wondering whether my expectations were too high.

Whether my memory was inaccurate.

Whether my nervous system was defective.

Whether my needs were simply too much.

Looking back, I no longer think any single interaction tells the story.

The story is the repetition.

Not because repetition proves someone’s intentions.

It doesn’t.

But repetition reveals the emotional climate a relationship creates.

I don’t know why another person behaved the way they did.

I no longer spend much time trying to answer that question.

The question that matters to me now is much simpler.

Who was I becoming and what was I agreeing to while I was trying so hard to make sense of it?

Whatever else may be true, this also happened.