Rewriting Life Stories
Now, another thing one read from the book How to Know a Person by David Brooks. He spoke of "rewriting your life stories to be coherent". This rewriting, in fact, is done in your subconscious. You never knew you rewrote your life story, that you rewrote history.
When one was 16, one faced with a friendship crisis, and seek out self-help to "solve the problem". The ultimate problem wasn't totally solved, but things have been better, and one appreciated one's effort, and still keep on trying to better oneself at it. The problem is, when one told one's life stories, one told about how before 16 one was so lonely and alone and suddenly one found the true meaning of life! Unfortunately, that's not true. And worse, one don't know that it's not true.
In fact, when in primary school, while yes, one don't have any close friends then (due to how one behaves as a classroom clown so people see me more as someone whom cannot become a close friend, not even entering a group), but to say that one don't have friends is too much an exaggeration. One used to play "ice and water" with random groups of friends. One used to play chinese chess during recess. One used to gather around other groups of people; though they don't totally welcome one, they don't reject me either, and one just sit, look, sometimes participate a bit, but not much. Yet, that's far from "no friend".
The focus is, just how strongly one can rewrite one's history is fascinating. As one got to secondary school, one got more and more lonely, particularly after changing school that caused a lot of familiar friends to move away between those who stayed and those who moved with me; plus, those familiar friends are split into different classes. We do have new opportunities to make new friends, but that is starting all over again. In contrast, back in primary school, one only have one large change of class between primary 3 and 4, when primary 4 onwards, they group you according to your rank in school (total points you score across subjects, so the more patient teachers are assigned to the 'more difficult to be taught' class, probably). It means, if you're not slacking off, and the others in your class also not slacking off, and you're all in the top 3 class, you probably don't swap class that easily and stayed in for 3 years. That's also the same in secondary; but making friends in primary school when you're still adolescent and making friends in secondary school when you're a teen is a totally different story. You don't totally understand what it means by "throwing away your face and just go all out and make sure you get friends" when you're still in adolescent (well, except for those God-granted kid that mature too early in their life, which is, what a pity, they may never had enough time to learn what it means by "don't care about face"). But in teen years, you start to care about face, and the relationship, how you interact with others, changed. That makes friendship making harder, unless you're outgoing enough, brave enough, etc.
And "time bias" probably led one to rewrite one's life stories. Because of how vivid you can remember a few years back compared to decades back, you put more weight to the recent timeline than to the ones older. Furthermore, one might had imposed the current feeling on the past feelings, hence distorted one's memory of the past (at least, to temporarily for a few years or even decades, cover up that part of the memory so one couldn't access it). Plus, author David Brooks also mentioned the distortion, to align your consciousness, your narrative story, so that what you tell yourself is more coherent. One really agrees with that.
For now, one had multiple life stories to tell oneself. The friendship crisis, since it's not totally over, nor do one think it'll be over before one die, will continue on, and one'll certainly come back to it and never put it down, to make "friends" the central stage of one's focus. On the other hand, one had other things to pursue, like one's careers, so that'll take slightly more focus at the moment. The reading done on the book is to remind oneself, however one goes far and deep into the career route, do not forget what is the most important thing in life. Career can never make one satisfy, so never forget to seek out friends, to make new friends, and hopefully find a handful of close friends that could last until one die. Or at least, for decades, and not just a few years, which is way too short to know each other, to peer beneath what they displayed in public, and believe me, starting all over again is a pain in the arse, so if you could preserve your current friends, do them.
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