Is My Memory Gaslighting Me?

Growing up, my sister and I spent the majority of our time together, playing with Barbies, chasing each other around the yard, and watching lots of movies. We had our favourites, of course, the ones we would rewatch over and over again until we could recite them, some that we knew so well we would act them out.

One movie I remember watching all the time was Bratz: Babyz – The Movie. It’s an odd, somewhat obnoxious movie that I am embarrassed to say I still enjoy watching every once in a while. Let’s be honest, we all have a good comfort movie that we’d rather keep to ourselves (even if it is on my Letterbox list of top movies). Imagine my reaction to turning on this movie that I had thought was one of our cult classics with my sister, and she claims she’s never seen it before. 

In my second year of university, I took a creative non-fiction class where we read a lot of works by the author Roy Peter Clark. One of his pieces in particular was about the fictivity of memoirs. He defined memories as a mix of reality and imagination, which are all altered from each person’s point of view. Which makes sense, but made me spiral a bit, wondering not only if the moments captured in memoirs and news reports are truthful, but if any stories recounted from memory can be true. If the way we remember things is not necessarily the way they happened, who is to say what did happen if moments are up to interpretation?

But back to Bratz Babyz.

I figured I’d jog my sister’s memory, telling her about a time we were babysitting together, probably around the ages of 11 and 14, for some of our family friends. We didn’t babysit for them frequently, so it was out of the ordinary. Once the kids went to sleep, we went through the family’s DVD collection and practically squealed when we saw they had a copy of Bratz: Babyz – The Movie, which we of course picked out to watch. We sat on pillows in front of their TV, making sure the volume was low enough not to wake the sleeping kids. I can remember the parents laughing at us when they came home and caught us watching it, and we had to explain the significance the movie had in our childhood. 

My sister remembers that night, the kids, the house, and everything else about it, but has no recollection of watching that movie.

I also feel I should mention that I am the youngest sister, and I obviously was never allowed to pick the movie we got to watch, so it doesn’t make sense that I would have either a) watched this alone, or b) picked it out for us to watch. 

I then went and asked my other sister, who wasn’t with us that night that we were babysitting, but I thought she might have watched it with us before, but she had no clue what I was talking about.

By the end of the conversation, I was starting to question my sanity and also these ‘memorable’ childhood moments I thought we had shared, like watching Bratz Babyz. 

Check out other articles from Her Campus! Is my memory gaslighting me?

• childhood
• entertainment
• memories
• movies