Dear Lana,

It’s funny how you can perceive something so different from the way it actually unfolds.

The funny thing about photos is that they carry a timestamp. It was taken in a specific moment in time, and just as important as the contents of the photo itself is the digital imprint of the context of the photo. Recording the past in this way is an easy to way to tap into memories that you have otherwise forgotten. You can access your own memories through a different lens, as if you are Dumbledore taking the plunge in his own Pensieve.

I’ve come to realize that a lot of my memories are a function of selective perception. Once we creative a narrative of how we believed our lives were in the past, we continue to keep memories that reinforce this narrative while discarding the ones that do not. Now that I have achieved some semblance of peace in my life, my life is not nearly as hectic as I remembered it to be. Was this what Romantic subjectivism meant?

There was a time when I viewed Romantic art as my favorite artistic movement. The emphasis on nature through a vivid palette captured the turbulence in which I saw the world unfolding in my adolescent eyes. I wrote a lot during this period — at least, by my standards then — and a lot of it was about the toxicity in which I saw the world.

Now that I reflect back on this period, it doesn’t seem as hectic. Aristotle may have said we are what we repeatedly do, but I think more accurately we are we we repeatedly notice. There is the world around us, but it is not the world we claim it to be. In this regard, I think it’s appropriate to acknowledge in the artist in us that constructs our own world. It is not the world of others because we do not notice what others observe. It is our world because we created it with our minds and our own perceptions. With that comes great power.