Rashomon Brain

A while ago, someone asked if I ever get stuck in the past. They meant well. But the question landed oddly - confusing blueprints for debris.

I don’t get stuck. I rotate the structure.

Call it Rashomon brain. Faced with a memory, I re-run it, and split it into overlays. Not because I’m lost, but because building the full geometry of a memory sometimes requires holding what doesn’t line up.

This isn’t rumination, though some might see it that way. I know the difference. Rumination is an ouroboros - tightening while eating its own tail. My way is generative, even when it hurts - a re-examination of patterns, seen from a new corner each time.

I’ve lived enough to become an expert in memory’s architecture. I know what bends under weight and what loops back changed but more true. Flashbacks are part of it. But so is pattern recognition - moments decades apart connecting with a click you can hear in your bones.

A gesture from a date in 2018 overlays a teacher’s smirk in 1994, which in turn echoes a warning in 2020. Leaving a job in 2016 makes even more sense in retrospect than it did in the moment, once I trace the crossbeams. The feeling isn’t nostalgia; it’s forensic.

I don’t dwell. I contextualize. Narrative threads become a kind of scaffolding, not for reliving pain, but for claiming a view. Sometimes this is about survival. Sometimes it just helps me understand.

If you’ve learned to build meaning from fragments, you know there was never a single story handed to you. What feels like “not letting go” might be the only reliable map you ever receive. Meaning here is alive, changing shape as I gain perspective.

So yes, I go back. But not to get stuck. I go back for calibration. The past isn’t a trap if it’s wired for awareness.

Sometimes, you gain a plan by re-reading the blueprint, and finding that there wasn’t debris at all.