I’ve been visiting my past.

How nice, you might think, an oldster strolling memory lane. Many oldsters do. Memoir writing is an activity offered to seniors to while the hours. Here’s how to tell your tale – to grandkids typically – so they’ll know “where they come from.” Recommended palette: pastels.

My audience isn’t grandkids – or contemporaries – or posterity – or you. My goal isn’t even a book, though everything what happens to me somehow digests into words. I’m traveling backward because yesterday’s a destination that beckons, more even than Belgium or Thailand. I want to see the sights because… I just do. Not to impress with blah-blah and snapshots or to “set the record straight.” For no reason except to know. I am a microcosm, each of us is, whose evolution and adventures resemble one another’s. As young Tennyson crooned to a flower:

(That final rhyme, one of the trickiest in English, shouldn’t work, but does.)

How consoling, one might think, to master one’s yesteryear! I’d been looking forward to it, taking practice hikes, getting in shape. Turns out, it’s a wretched trek, arduous, dangerous, testing grit and guts, no walk in the park. I avoid doing it each day, cringing under my blanket, clutching my pillow, preferring to write about it than do it (as I’m doing now).

Why so difficult?

Our past isn’t what we think. We’ve been rewriting it since it happened, revising, editing, reordering, so it suits our needs. This process is involuntary. Alone among creatures, humans require a story that flatters us, recasting defeats into victories and ogres into saviors if they’re on our team. We don’t mean to deceive ourselves, but we can’t help it. We want to feel good about who we’ve been. Even self-loathers (a sorry subset) may pride themselves on their courageous candor.

My past is not what I thought. The deeper I search the stranger I become to my self-conception. From a distance, I discern patterns that startle. Were my parents who I thought? Did I choose this life or was I dragged into it by some inevitable leash? How did I become who I am? Why think these thoughts? Nature, nurture, nation, notion? Villain, victim, hero?

The more I explore, the less I know. I tremble to open locked closets, like Bluebeard’s bride, yet I must. Curiosity overrides prudence. In the words of Mozart’s most perfect song, “Vorrei e non vorrei – I want to and I don’t.”

What unsettles me is not that my past is lurid. The skeletons in my closet are hardly mini-series-worthy. What spooks – and prompts these paragraphs – is the disparity between fact and fantasy. If I’m not who I thought, then who? I stomp on my sturdy story, and it gives way like a trap door leaving me dangling midair.

Why not quit the search? Because I can’t. I haven’t felt this curious since waiting for Jane to say yes. I can’t wait to find out – and dread what I’ll find.

Introspection was discouraged in my boyhood home. “No trespassing” signs were posted around the past. No one wondered why we were here – or thought for ourselves. We were born into expectations – now get on with it!

Humility is a byproduct of introspection. If you’re not sure who you are or how you got here, how can you be vain?