A few years ago, I processed the witness statements of a number of Norwegian mariners, coast guards, maritime pilots, etc., who were involved in a collision between a Norwegian frigate and a tanker. The frigate sank. The statements were collected and recorded, in the Norwegians' native language, hours after the event. These were professionals, reporting on their professional duties.
Their accounts were mutually incompatible. Two officers, standing next to each other, reported a different sequence of events. Their 'experiences', as 'lived', and as reported, could not, to a large degree, have matched the reality.
In the moment of perceiving sense data—what is seen, what is heard, what is felt physically—the sense data is interpreted into a narrative. Even a short passage of time deletes most of this and leaves only a general story arc, punctuated by key episodes and sensory fragments.
Even as the event is happening, the experience is something concocted within the individual. What I experience is only ever a narrative I am spinning in real time about the experience, and, as soon as the narrative is constructed, the inspiration falls away and ceases to be accessible.
Why is this relevant?
Sometimes, great importance is given to what are called 'real events' that happened, particularly in childhood. To understand and to process these 'real experiences' appears of paramount importance. To deny them: both dishonest and pragmatically foolish.
Let's be clear. These experiences, say in my child, did not happen. There were events that happened. But one hundred people would have woven one hundred entirely different, and mutually exclusive, narratives about them. These narratives might have served as test cases, setting precedent in the jurisprudence of how I construe the rights and wrongs in my life. As such, the problem lies not even in the test case but in its continuing ability to prevail, to govern how present cases are adjudicated upon.
In other words, although work must be done, the work is only ever on present attitudes, beliefs, patterns of thinking, and present memories of past narratives. I was not even there for the past at the time: I was present only to my version of it, projected in real time onto the wall by the way I held my hands between the source of light and the stone. It is that that I remember, not the fire. (Sorry, Plato.)
The problem lies not with lived experience but remembered fantasy. There is no such thing as experience. This relieves those events themselves, and in particular of the people involved in them, of the terrible burden of responsibility, and relieves me of the yoke of victimhood. This can now be resolutely cast off, and I am left dealing only with the present, whose yoke is always light.