Versions of Me, Remembered and Reclaimed

There are versions of me that I’ll never meet again—versions that live solely in the recollections of people who no longer speak my name. Somewhere, in someone’s past, I am still laughing like I used to, trusting like I hadn’t ever done. Maybe I’m still full of dreams, I’ve since outgrown, still naive, still open, still entirely unaware of how short-lived some connections could be. It’s haunting in a way—to know that fragments of who I was are kept alive in people I’ve let go of or who let go of me first.

Sometimes I wonder if they remember me accurately. Do they recall the softness in my voice, or has it been replaced by the echo of our final argument? Am I preserved in kindness, or blurred by resentment? Did they ever know me at all, or just the version I carefully presented at the time? It’s strange to be a whole person who exists in scattered pieces, incomplete pieces in other people’s minds—edited, misinterpreted, romanticized, and atlas-forgotten.

There are versions of me out there I might not even recognize now. And perhaps I, too, carry others the same way—unfinished stories, imagined endings, memories built on fading truths. I suppose that’s what we become eventually: stories told by people who no longer know how to find us, and maybe never really will.

But lately, I’ve been trying to gather the versions of myself I’ve scattered across timelines and people. Trying to remember not just who I was through someone else’s eyes, but who I actually felt like in those moments. It’s easier to let others define us—especially when we’re desperate to be understood, or loved, or simply seen. But there comes a quiet ache in realizing that so much of who you became was shaped around how others perceived you, or what they needed you to be.

So I’ve started reclaiming those stories. I’ve begun to revisit old memories, not to romanticize or revise them, but to meet myself again—without judgment, without needing to fit into the confines of someone else’s recollection. The girl who over-explained her feelings, the friend who tried too hard, the lover who lost herself in giving—she was not weak, or dramatic, or disposable. She was just learning. And she deserves to be remembered, not just through the lens of those who left, but by the one who stayed.

There’s a quiet kind of power in choosing to remember yourself gently. In saying: I was there, too. I felt all of it as well. I was not just a chapter in someone else’s story—I was the whole book, even if they only read a page.

And maybe that’s what healing looks like—not erasing the versions of me that lived in others, but finally choosing to author the one that lives in me.