Yes, I DO Remember

Another one of those get­ting-along-with-Cyn­thia rules—one that my fam­i­ly of ori­gin would do well to note.

Don’t play crazy-mak­ing mem­o­ry games with me. I had my mem­o­ries ques­tioned and denied so often in my ear­ly life that I:
1) Devel­oped a damned good mem­o­ry. I remem­ber some­thing very close to a record­ing-per­fect ver­sion of any con­ver­sa­tion. Yes, this has been proven repeat­ed­ly in var­i­ous situations.
2) Keep records of writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions like email and chat.
3) Fre­quent­ly men­tion those spo­ken con­ver­sa­tions with pre­cise quotes in my (hand­writ­ten) jour­nal or oth­er writ­ten media, because if I’m going to bring some­thing up I want to be as accu­rate as possible.

If I tell you that I said ‚“I haven’t made any changes to that site in over a year” then that’s exact­ly what I said. Whether or not you heard “that site’s been gone for over a year” is no reflec­tion on my veracity. 

If I tell you that yes, I did let you know that X might come over on Sun­day, then, believe me, I did tell you that. While you were con­scious, even. If you did­n’t lis­ten to me, or just don’t remem­ber it, that’s not my fault.

If we’re dis­cussing a writ­ten exchange, it’s espe­cial­ly stu­pid to try to twist things around or change his­to­ry. If you changed it in your mem­o­ry, I’ll pro­vide doc­u­men­ta­tion to refresh your mem­o­ry if necessary—and if it’s nec­es­sary, it is unlike­ly that I will ever trust you again, because I con­sid­er you dis­hon­est. Don’t try to claim that your mem­o­ry is bet­ter than my records because it isn’t.

Num­ber 1 also means that if you at any time said, “I hate you,” then for me it’s still echo­ing. Don’t use that kind of lan­guage if you’re over three years old and have any inter­est in an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship with me. In fact, don’t say any­thing you would­n’t want to have echo­ing through the rest of our association.