There’s something I have caught myself doing, and I suspect I am not alone in it.

When I look back on a particular stretch of my life, the facts do not change much. But which facts come to me, which ones rise up first and loudest, that shifts depending on where I happen to be standing now. The same years, but different memories — as if some part of me is choosing what to hand over.

It turns out, there may be a very good explanation for this. 

A quick note before I go further. I am not a psychologist or a memory researcher, just a writer who finds this stuff hard to stop thinking about. The model below is one influential framework, not settled fact, and it is a theory of how memory might work rather than a proven account of the brain. Take it as a way of seeing, not a diagnosis.

Memory as construction, not playback

The frame that has helped me most here comes from a 2000 paper by cognitive psychologists Martin A. Conway and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce, published in Psychological Review. It became one of the most cited frameworks in the study of autobiographical memory. Their proposal cuts against the way most of us picture remembering.

We tend to imagine memory as a filing cabinet. Something happened, it got stored, and recalling it is a matter of pulling the right folder and pressing play. Conway and Pleydell-Pearce propose something looser and stranger. In their model, “memories are transitory mental constructions within a self-memory system (SMS). The SMS contains an autobiographical knowledge base and current goals of the working self.” Basically, a memory might be somewhat assembled in the moment, not retrieved intact.

The working self holds the torch

The part that stays with me is the “working self.”Conway and Pleydell-Pearce argue that “control processes modulate access to the knowledge base by successively shaping cues used to activate autobiographical memory knowledge structures and, in this way, form specific memories.”

Plainly: the version of you who exists right now, with your present goals and your present picture of who you are, may be standing at the door of your own past, deciding which pieces get to come through. The torch you carry into the dark might be shaped by who you are trying to be. You see what it lights up.

In a later elaboration, Conway put the relationship plainly: “autobiographical knowledge constrains what the self is, has been, and can be, whereas the working self-modulates access to long-term knowledge.” It runs both ways. Your past sets limits on who you can plausibly claim to be, and your present self decides which bits of that past you reach for. Within this framework, “memory is viewed as the data base of the self,” and the self is a moving set of goals doing the querying.

What this means

None of this means memory is fiction or that the past is up for grabs. The model is careful about this. Conway and Pleydell-Pearce hold that “the relation of the knowledge base to active goals is reciprocal,” and that the knowledge base “grounds” the goals of the working self. You cannot simply remember whatever flatters you. The record pushes back. But within those limits, there is real room for the present self to choose the lighting.

If you find yourself revisiting a hard stretch of your own past and the version that keeps surfacing is the one that hurts, that is worth taking seriously, and a good therapist is far better company for it than any article.