Realities

My brother and I grew up in the same house.

When we talk about our childhood now, I sometimes wonder if we are talking about the same family.

The facts are often similar enough.

The stories are not.

There are moments I remember vividly that seem to carry little significance for him. There are experiences that shaped his understanding of our family that barely registered in mine. Occasionally we remember the same event entirely differently, as though two separate realities unfolded in the same room.

What makes this difficult to dismiss is that neither of us is inventing anything. We are both remembering honestly. We are both reaching back into the same life and returning with different versions of what it felt like to live there.

For a long time, I assumed disagreements about the past were disagreements about facts. Someone remembered correctly and someone remembered incorrectly. It seemed like the simplest explanation.

Life has made that explanation difficult to keep.

My brother and I can often agree on the facts of an event. We can agree that something happened, who was present, and what was said. Yet somehow those same events came to occupy very different places in our lives. What remained with me did not always remain with him. What shaped him did not always shape me. And the question expands beyond the two of us.

My mother and father would each have their own realities. We often speak of a family as though it were a shared experience. A single story.

I’m no longer sure that it is.

Was it ever the same reality to begin with?

If this is true, then understanding may require something more than defending our version of events. It may require a willingness to consider that someone else lived through the same moment and walked away with a different outlook than we did.

What once felt like a disagreement now feels like an invitation to understand a reality I never had access to.

That’s fascinating.

Really?

That’s what it was like for you?

When I think about my brother and me, I no longer find myself wondering whose memory is more accurate. The more interesting question is how two people can share a life and walk away carrying such different realities and lessons from it.

I suspect we are not the exception.

Perhaps many of us are moving through life defending the reality we experienced without giving much consideration to the realities experienced by others.

And that may be costing us the very growth we seek.