There are decisions in my life that, looking back, I explained to myself for a long time in ways that were probably different from how I had actually made them. At the time, I was convinced I was acting rationally. I had reasons, arguments and a story that made complete sense. Only with distance did I begin to recognise that something else had been lying beneath it: fear, comfort, wounded pride, the desire for approval or simply the need not to look too closely at an uncomfortable truth. What struck me was not so much that I had deceived myself. What struck me more was how true the explanation had felt at the time. I did not feel as though I was making anything up. I genuinely believed my own version of what had happened. That is something I find fascinating: a story about ourselves does not have to be invented in order to mislead us. It is enough for it to tell only part of what was really taking place within us.
Over time, I have noticed how much we rely on experiencing ourselves as reasonably coherent human beings. We want to understand why we do something, why we made a particular decision or why we have arrived at a certain point in our lives. Complete contradiction would be difficult to live with. So the mind connects experiences, feelings and memories and shapes them into something that makes sense. I do not see anything inherently wrong in that. Without those inner connections, we would probably struggle to orient ourselves at all. The difficulty begins when the story is no longer simply one interpretation of our experience, but gradually becomes the truth about who we are.
I know this particularly in relation to my own self-image. If I think of myself as independent, it becomes harder to acknowledge how much another person’s approval matters to me. If I see myself as generous, I may not like the idea that envy played a part in one of my reactions. If I regard myself as courageous, caution sounds more comfortable than fear. I do not necessarily have to change my self-image. Often it is enough to adjust the meaning of what happened. The desire for approval becomes objectivity. Wounded pride becomes principle. Fear becomes sensible restraint. None of these explanations has to be completely false. That is precisely what makes them so convincing. They contain enough truth to feel credible while leaving those parts in the background that do not fit quite so comfortably with the person I believe myself to be.
It becomes particularly interesting for me when the same patterns repeat over a longer period of time. If I avoid doing something once, there may be countless reasonable explanations. But if I keep stepping back at the same point for years and find a new explanation each time, it is worth looking more closely. I used to tell myself for a long time that the timing simply was not right, that other things mattered more or that a decision needed longer to mature. Looking back, I sometimes realised that beneath all those changing explanations lay something remarkably constant. I did not want to experience what might happen if I actually acted. As long as I do not begin, I cannot fail. As long as I do not show myself, I cannot be rejected. As long as I do not make a clear decision, several possibilities remain open. My mind did not have to invent the fear. It only had to give it another name.
This inner storytelling becomes even clearer to me when I look at memory. I have experienced how the meaning of past situations can change over the years. Not necessarily because I consciously distort anything, but because memory has never felt to me like an unchanged recording. I remember from the perspective of who I am now. Experiences that may once have been open, contradictory or barely understood are later given a context. Suddenly, a development appears to have been moving towards one particular point all along. A relationship seems, in retrospect, to have been exactly as I now judge it from the very beginning. A decision appears inevitable. Individual experiences become a life story, and the more often I tell it, the more familiar and complete it begins to feel.
Statements such as “I’ve always been like this” make me pause now. They may be true and still conceal a great deal. They give continuity to my life, but they can also make changes, contradictions and parts of my personality disappear simply because they do not fit the story. Other people can help reinforce these narratives too. If I describe a situation to a friend from my perspective and receive agreement, my interpretation naturally feels even more convincing. Today it is also easier than ever to find people, explanations and experiences that support almost any belief we hold. That does not make agreement worthless. But it does not automatically make our story more complete either.
This understanding has changed what honesty with myself means to me. I no longer think it requires me to know exactly why I am doing something at every moment. Quite often, I simply do not know. My motives may be mixed, my memories incomplete and my explanations shaped by the person I believe myself to be today. I now find it more honest to allow an explanation to remain a possibility rather than immediately turning it into a final truth. “This is how I see it today” feels different to me from “This is how it was.” There is space in that small distinction. Space for a later experience to reveal something that I cannot yet see.
This question also lies close to much of what I explored in “I – Your Best Liar”. When writing it, I was interested not only in how we deceive ourselves in individual moments, but in how countless small interpretations can gradually become an entire story about who we are. The inner liar does not have to be some foreign voice feeding us falsehoods. She speaks in our own words. She knows our memories, our fears, our wishes and the image of ourselves we would like to preserve. That is precisely why her explanations feel so familiar. We do not recognise them as manipulation because they sound like our own truth.
I therefore no longer try to question my entire life story. It belongs to me too. It gives experiences a sense of connection and helps me understand myself. I simply do not want to forget that it remains a perspective. That the same past may look different from another stage of life. That a motive which seems obvious to me today may have been only one part of what was happening. And that admitting I do not fully understand myself does not make me less honest.
Every now and then, I notice a sentence I have been telling myself for years. It sounds familiar, logical and almost self-evident. Then suddenly something about it no longer quite fits. Not enough for me to expose it as a lie. It has simply become too narrow for what I can now perceive. I no longer experience such moments as a loss of certainty. They feel more like a small opening. The story remains, but it no longer has to explain everything. And perhaps that is where a different kind of honesty begins: not in finally knowing the complete truth about ourselves, but in remaining willing to read our own story again from another angle.