Reconfigure Your Memories

We build memories from these narratives. Classes instructor Jenessa Abrams wants you to try changing your story with this two-part writing prompt.

Whenever I’m asked about my family, the language that first comes to mind is found language—the stories I’ve been told over the course of my life about my mother’s water breaking at the airport or how as a child, I’d lick squares of butter off my toast. I don’t remember my mother driving herself to the hospital or the pleasure of my younger self enjoying thick globs of butter, but I tell these stories anyway because they are the stories that were told to me. About me. In which I appear, but also, in which I do not appear. We build memories from these narratives. Construct meaning about our lives. About the things that’ve happened to us. About how we did or did not act. They become imbedded in who we are. In our understanding of ourselves.

I want you to change your story. But to change it, first we need to write it:

Step One:

Revisit a memory that haunts you—a moment that lingers in your life. It could be a story you’ve been told or a story that you deeply remember. It doesn’t have to be dramatic or climactic, though it could be, the most important thing is that the memory has resonance for you.

Then write the memory as a short scene exactly as it happened. Exactly as you or the telling remembers it.

Step Two:

Rewrite the memory as fiction, meaning, return to the memory, but change it. Reconstruct it.

Your change must totally reconfigure the scene, alter what happened—literally, emotionally, and/or psychologically.

For example: If during a particularly challenging conversation with your mother, you hung up the phone and then the two of you didn’t speak for months, imagine what would’ve happened if you’d stayed on the line. Write the scene where you talk through it. Imagine what your mother may have said, or what you may have said. Imagine the possibility of understanding or forgiveness, which may or may not have felt reachable, feasible, or possible in the moment.

The point is to make something happen that didn’t. Maybe that couldn’t have. Then follow it. See where it takes you.

Build a new reality for yourself and discover who you are within it.

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If you enjoyed this prompt, check out Jenessa’s upcoming Catapult class, which begins this September.