The Immutable Past · What Is
What Is My Truth
“My truth” is usually heard as a claim that each person has a past of their own. Derived from the foundation’s first result, that there is exactly one past, the phrase turns out to be doing two jobs at once, and only one of them is about the past. There are as many readings as there are people. What happened is one.
The count the phrase gets wrong
n readings · 1 past
Heard the strong way, the phrase runs n readings to n pasts: one for every speaker.
The foundation’s first result says there is exactly one past: one totality, not several disconnected ones. It says nothing about who reads it or how well. Readings are as many as the people doing the reading. The possessive in my truth belongs on the reading, where it is exactly right. Only when it moves onto the past does the phrase say something the foundation denies.
Contents
- “My truth,” stated fairly
- Neighbours, separated first
- Three cases the strong reading cannot hold
- Three jobs in two words
- What there is one of
- Why there are many readings
- What a conflict needs
- Who holds the one past
- When my truth changes
- What it costs
- An ordinary Tuesday
Few phrases have travelled as fast in a generation. Speaking my truth. That’s my truth. You have your truth and I have mine. My version of events. The phrase earns its place. It is usually said by somebody who has spent a long time having their account of their own life overruled — by a family, an institution, a person with more standing — and it says, in two words, that the account is theirs to give and does not need anyone’s permission to be given.
Underneath it sit two different claims, and the phrase does not mark which one is being made. The modest claim is that this is how it was for me: I stood where I stood, saw what I saw, and carry what I carry, and nobody else’s account replaces that. The strong claim is that what happened to me is mine in the way my reading is mine — that there is a past for me and a past for you, and that yours cannot reach mine. Most of the time the speaker means the first. The phrase can be heard as the second, and in an argument it usually is.
So it is worth asking what the phrase claims. Not whether people should be believed; this piece takes no side on that, and will say so again. What the word my is attached to.
Neighbours, separated first
Several earlier pieces sit close, and the differences should come first. The piece on agreement asked what it means when readings converge — when a room agrees, or a second opinion matches the first — and took the one thing to be right about as given. This piece asks the question that one took for granted: whether there is one thing to agree about at all. Nothing here concerns whether readings converge, how often, or what a head count is worth.
The piece on witnesses is about the perceiver: what happens in a person who sees something. The piece on memory is about what a memory is: a present reading of marks, not a visit to the event. Both are carried over here in words and not argued again. The piece on ancestors took the case in which nobody reads at all — a life that left almost no record and is exactly as settled as one that left a great deal. This piece takes the opposite case: several people reading at once, each certain, and a phrase that seems to let them all be right.
One more neighbour sits outside the series. A Frame Is an Angle, in the mathematics lessons, meets your truth, my truth head-on through relativity: two observers disagree about components and agree about invariants. The shape here is different in the one respect that matters, and the difference is set out in the section on who holds the one past.
Three cases the strong reading cannot hold
Put ordinary cases against the strong reading — not exotic ones, just three places where the phrase is said.
Case one · the kitchen table
Two sisters, now in their forties, describe the house they grew up in. One says their father’s temper ran the place. The other remembers him as mostly quiet and mostly absent. Each is speaking her truth, and the phrase is doing honest work: each is reporting from where she stood. Then the elder says, that was the year you were away at school. The younger is quiet for a while, and then says, I didn’t know. Hold that moment still. She did not say that her sister’s father was a different man from hers. She took what she had heard and put it in the same house. The strong reading has no room for what she just did. If each had a past of her own, there would be nothing to learn from the other’s, and she learned something.
Case two · the denial
She says he did it. He says he did not. She says: this is my truth. If the phrase means what the strong reading says, his denial is his truth, and the two sentences are about two different pasts and do not touch. Nothing he says can reach her account — and nothing he says is wrong, either. She will not accept that, and she is right not to. The whole force of what she is saying is that his account is false: about the same evening, the same room, the same act. The strong reading of her own phrase takes that force away from her.
Case three · the meeting
Two colleagues disagree about whether a deadline was agreed at Tuesday’s meeting. After ten minutes one of them says, fine — that’s your truth, and the conversation ends. Then both of them go looking for the minutes, each certain the minutes will say what they remember. The sentence ended the talk and did not end the question, and both people’s next move shows that neither believed it had. You do not search a record for something that could not settle anything.
The seam is the same in all three. At the moment the phrase is tested, each person behaves as if there is one past that the accounts are about — the sister who learns, the woman who says he is lying, the colleague who opens the minutes. The strong reading is a claim that none of them acts on.
Three jobs in two words
Figure 01
What the phrase can be claiming, and what the foundation says about each
- Standing “It is mine to say.” A claim about who may give an account, and whether they need permission. Foundation: silent. Nothing here touches it.
- Reading “This is how it was for me.” A report from one person’s position, carried in that person. Foundation: plural by construction — as many as there are people reading.
- A past of its own “What happened to me is not what happened to you.” A claim that pasts are as many as speakers, with nothing running between them. Foundation: denied — one past, not several disconnected ones.
The first job is out of this essay’s reach, and it is left exactly as it was. Whether a person may give an account of their own life without anybody’s leave is a question about people and permissions, and nothing in what follows bears on it. The second and third jobs are where the phrase has to be read carefully, because the word my sits in front of both and means something different in each.
What there is one of
The foundation starts from an axiom — the past is immutable (P0) — and states it precisely: the records admit exactly one consistent assignment, and no present operation can produce a different one. Beside it sits a second primitive: the Past contains one settled totality, not one branch (P1). From the two, the first result follows. There is exactly one past — one totality, not several disconnected ones (R1).
The last clause is the one this piece is about, and no earlier piece has taken it as its subject. Not several disconnected ones. It denies more than it seems to. It does not only say that the past is unchanging, or that it is complete. It says there is no second totality alongside the first: no past of yours sitting next to a past of mine with no consistency running between them. Whatever happened in that kitchen, on that evening, at that meeting, is part of one assignment, and each account of it — the sister’s, the man’s, the colleague’s — is an account of a piece of that one.
Note what the result does not contain. It has no term for any reader. It says there is one; it says nothing about who is closer to it. That silence carries weight, and the section on who holds the one past depends on it.
Why there are many readings
If there is one past, why is there so much disagreement about it among people who are not lying? The foundation answers that directly, and the answer is not that most people are wrong.
What a person has of any moment is not the moment. It is a quotient: what actually happened, divided by what that person was predicting and holding in mind — R = A / E, with the expectation term belonging to the person (P4). The human experiences only the quotient: not the Actual, not the Expectation, but R (R8). Two people in one kitchen bring two expectations to it, and come away with two quotients. The witness piece put this in the form that matters here: one act leaves two marks in two honest people, and there is no mark made from nowhere to compare them against. And a memory, as the memory piece argued, is a present reading of those marks, made again each time it is recalled.
So plurality is not a failure. It is guaranteed, and it is guaranteed at exactly one level: the reading.
Marked construction 01 — consequence, not doctrine
The possessive attaches to the reading and cannot attach to the past. There are as many readings as there are people reading; there is one past they are readings of.
Grounds. R1 supplies the second clause directly: one totality, not several disconnected ones. P4 and R8 supply the first: what a person has is a quotient at their own denominator, so readings multiply with the people doing the reading. The construction is only the pairing — it assigns plurality to one level and unity to the other — and because the pairing is this piece’s step rather than a numbered result, it is marked. It says nothing about which reading is closer to what happened.
This is why the phrase feels right, and why it feels right to the people who most need it. The plurality in it is not invented. It is there, at the level where everyone lives. Nobody experiences the past; everyone experiences a reading, and it is natural to call the only thing you have your truth. The phrase goes wrong at one step: when it takes the plural that belongs to the reading and moves it onto what happened.
What a conflict needs
Go back to the second case, because that is where the strong reading does its damage, and the damage lands on the person using the phrase.
Two accounts can conflict only if they are about the same thing. She says he did it; he says he did not. Those sentences contradict each other only if it is one act, on one evening, in one past. Give each of them a past of their own and the contradiction disappears — not resolved, dissolved. Her account holds of hers, his of his, and there is nothing left for either to be wrong about.
Marked construction 02 — consequence, resting on an ordinary sense
Two accounts can contradict each other only if there is one past for them to be about. The strong reading of “my truth” removes every contradiction, including the ones the speaker most needs.
Grounds. R1 gives the one past. The step from there is elementary: a contradiction needs a common subject, and two accounts of two disconnected pasts share none. The construction uses true and false in their ordinary sense — an account is true when what happened is as it says — and the foundation has no locked definition of truth, which the held-open note at the end records. Nothing in the construction needs more than the ordinary sense.
So the phrase, heard the strong way, disarms its own speaker. The woman in the second case needs one past, because she needs his denial to be wrong. What she is claiming is not a truth of her own. It is the truth about an evening he was also in. And her account is hers in the only sense that matters to her: she was there, she carries the marks, and she is the one giving it.
Who holds the one past
If there is one past and it has no reader in it, the next question is dangerous, and it has to be answered carefully. Who gets to say what it was?
The foundation’s answer is that nobody holds it. The Past is inaccessible, and the abundance of present records makes it appear otherwise (R9). The minutes of Tuesday’s meeting are a mark made by a person who was also reading the room. A court’s finding is a mark made under the conditions for making findings. A diary is a mark. A photograph is a mark. A majority is a count of readings. Each can be read against the others, and cross-checking has a floor, because genuine marks of one past constrain one another. But none of them is the past, and none of them is a reading from nowhere.
This is where the mathematics lesson and this piece part company. In relativity, two observers who disagree about components can each compute the invariant from where they stand, so disagreement comes with a way out that either party can take alone. Here the unity supplies no such computation. There is one past, and nobody can calculate it from their own position. It is what makes an account capable of being right. It is not a place any account stands.
Marked construction 03 — consequence, not doctrine
One past is not one authorised reading. The unity clause says there is one thing to be right about, and names nobody as right about it.
Grounds. R1 contains no term for a reader, so it cannot rank readings. R9 adds that no reader reaches the past directly — the institution, the record and the majority included. Together they give the construction: the unity makes it possible for an account to be right and possible for it to be wrong, and assigns neither outcome to anyone in advance. It supports believing an account and doubting it equally well, and should be read as supporting both.
That last sentence cuts both ways, and is meant to. The unity is what gives a disbelieved person’s account its force: it is about the same evening as the denial, and it can be right when the denial is wrong. The same unity is what makes it possible for a sincere account to be mistaken in a particular — a date, the order of events, who said what. Those two come together. No version of the phrase keeps the first and escapes the second, and no version of doubt keeps the second and escapes the first. The person who says the facts are on their side is holding a reading too.
When my truth changes
One ordinary use of the phrase deserves its own section, because the phrase describes it wrongly and the correction is useful. People say my truth has changed. Ten years on — after therapy, after a sibling’s account, after a letter found in a drawer — the story of what happened is different.
What changed is the reading. What happened did not: the records admit one consistent assignment, and no present operation produces a different one (P0). Nor is the earlier reading overwritten. Records update expectation forward and do not re-open (R2): the new account is a new mark, added beside the old one, and the old one stays — not as the truth about the event, but as a record of how it read to you then. Both are yours. Neither is the past. The history piece called this demotion to evidence about its own moment, and that is the right way to hold an account you no longer give. It does not have to be disowned in order to be superseded.
The plural in the phrase is genuine. It belongs to the reading. The phrase goes wrong only when it moves the plural onto what happened.
What it costs
Three costs, and they fall on different people.
The shelter goes. For the speaker, the strong reading held out somewhere nobody could reach: an account that could not be contradicted because it was about a past nobody else had. That shelter is not available. An account of what happened is an account of the one past, and it can be wrong in a particular. That is unwelcome, most of all to someone who reached for the phrase because they were tired of being contradicted. It is also the price of the account being able to be right.
The exit goes. For the listener, that’s your truth stops working as a way to leave. Said of a reading, it concedes something true of everyone, including the person saying it. Said of the past, it is false. Either way the question is still on the table when the conversation ends. If you want to stop talking, that is a fine thing to want, and it can be said directly.
The referee goes. For everyone, and hardest for anyone with standing — an institution, a parent, a court, the side with the documents — no reading is the past. The record, the finding and the majority are marks and readings, read against the rest and not over them. Nobody holds the last word by holding the past, because nobody holds the past.
And one refusal, stated once and kept. Nothing here says that the truth will out, that the accurate account is vindicated in the end, or that what was denied is known somewhere. One past means that the marks which survive cohere; it does not mean that marks survive, or that anyone reads them. No such promise is available on this side, and it would be dishonest to borrow one for the length of a paragraph.
If your account was not believed
If you are reading this because you told someone what happened to you and were not believed, nothing above is addressed to you as a correction. The argument does not say your account is one opinion among many. It says the person who did not believe you was holding a reading too, and that there is one past both accounts are about — which is the only ground on which your account could be right while theirs is wrong. If you used the phrase to protect your account, that is exactly what you were reaching for.
It can take one thing off, and only one: the sense that insisting on what happened is a claim to a private world that others are free to ignore. It is not that. It will not do more. Understanding this does not make anyone believe you, restores nothing, and there is no schedule on which anybody is supposed to be finished with it. Advocates, counsellors, and people who have been through the same thing are the help here. A metaphysics is not, and it must not be offered as though it were.
An ordinary Tuesday
- Keep the possessive where it belongs. Say my account, my reading, how it was for me. Standing and reading both survive the change, and the change removes the one thing an opponent could turn against you.
- Ask which job is running. Before arguing, ask whether you disagree about what happened or about how it was for each of you. If it is the second, there may be nothing to settle; two readings from two positions can both be accurate. If it is the first, there is one thing to be right about.
- Treat a conflict as a conflict. When two accounts of one event contradict each other, at least one misses in that particular. The contradiction tells you that much and nothing about which one — a point the agreement piece makes from the other side.
- Let an old account stand as a mark. When your reading changes, do not say your truth changed; say your reading did, and keep the old one as a record of how it read then (R2). You do not have to disown it to move past it.
- Nobody holds the past — not them, and not you. When someone says the facts are on their side, hear a reading with marks behind it, and weigh the marks. When you say it, expect to be heard the same way (R9).
There are as many readings as there are people, and each is wholly its owner’s. There is one past, and it belongs to no one. My truth is right about the first — and, heard the strong way, wrong about the second.
Held open
- What is truth, in the foundation’s vocabulary?
- The foundation has no locked definition of truth or of true. Marked construction 02 uses the ordinary sense — an account is true when what happened is as it says — and needs nothing more than that a contradiction requires a common subject. What would close it: a locked definition stated in the foundation’s own terms — for instance, true as a relation between a reading and the one consistent assignment of P0 — together with a check that it makes no reading true by construction, since by R8 nobody has anything but the quotient to offer. Adding a locked definition changes what the system claims and is the author’s decision. Held open.
- How two people’s expectations relate.
- The foundation carries no expression for the overlap between two people’s expectation terms. This piece needs only that there are two of them, so that there are two readings. Not approached.