In his novel "An Abundance of Katherines", John Green wrote, "You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."

I think what he means is that moments only happen once, and they only happen in a certain way. But when these moments are over, it doesn't matter what actually happened. It's more about your perspective: it's about how you experienced the moment, what you took away from the moment, and how you will remember the moment moving forward.

An oversimplified example of this concept can be found in a sporting event. If your team wins, it was a good experience for you, you're happy when you leave, and you will remember the day as a good one. If your team loses, the exact opposite is true.

So in this regard, what actually happened matters only to a certain extent— the objective truth— before our minds perceive, manipulate, and memorize something different.

This is inevitable.

Mario Puzo, acclaimed author of "The Godfather", among other pieces, also wrote a memoir entitled "Choosing a Dream: Italians in Hell's Kitchen" that was included in an anthology called "The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American."

If it weren't for my American Immigration class, I never would have read it. I'm glad I did.

In this memoir, Puzo discusses what it was like growing up with Italian Immigrant parents in Manhattan—specifically in an Italian ethnic enclave known as "Hell's Kitchen"—in the 1920s and 30s.

Growing up, he wanted to be a writer, and despised his family—particularly his mother—whose only expectation for him was to work on the railroad like thousands of Italian immigrants before him. She did not believe he could make a living as a writer. It wasn't practical, and it was unnecessary.

Furthermore, Puzo described the Italian Immigrants as "grim; always shouting, always angry, quicker to quarrel than embrace."

They were difficult and unfriendly and pessimistic.

To make a beautifully written story very short and specific, I will jump to the relevant take-away.

It isn't until the immigrant generation is dead and he grows old, that Puzo comes to understand his family —why their only expectation for him was to work on the railroad, why they opposed his dream so strongly, and why they were so stubborn.

Puzo explains they had lived very different lives than him—in many ways, more complex lives. They were transplanted to a new country—a new world they didn't know with a language they couldn't speak—and they left everything behind in an old world they would never see again. They faced discrimination and exclusion as immigrants—poor jobs and low wages. The new world they had idealized was imperfect. It was never home to them.

They lived very difficult lives. And so their pessimism toward Puzo's dream to be a writer wasn't out of spite but out of remorse, sadness, and anger at the new world. They didn't want him to fail. They were trying to be realistic.

Puzo, as an older successful writer, reflects back: "And all those old-style grim conservative Italians whom I hated, then pitied so patronizingly, they also turned out to be heroes... The thing that amazed me most was their courage... How did they ever have the balls to get married, have kids, go out to earn a living in a strange land with no skills, not even knowing the language? They made it without tranquilizers, without sleeping pills, without psychiatrists, without even a dream. Heroes. Heroes all around me. I never saw them."

Where am I going with this?

Throughout his memoir, Puzo points to this idea of retrospective falsification, which Dictionary.com defines as "The unconsciousdistortionofpastexperiencetoconformtopresent psychologicalneeds."

So here we are again. In this case, it isn't so much that what he remembered, became what happened,as how he remembered, became what happened.

In conjunction with John Green's quote, I think it is remarkable how we alter our memories in retrospect—how our memories, rather than our true experiences, shape our pasts, and how we forget this fact so easily.

Puzo saw his ancestors as heroes. Their pessimism, he viewed later, as fear of failure and reasonable thinking. He could empathize.

In some ways, he didn't want to remember them as antagonists. He wanted to remember them as good people. And so they became heroes in his memory.

And thus, the memory collapsed and transformed.

As a self-diagnosed over-thinker, I find that I can look back at a memory and see it differently.

I can walk away from the actual experience feeling a certain way, but then I can remember all of the details—analyze them to a paralyzing degree—and suddenly remember something entirely different. It's not necessarily wrong, it's just a different perspective. I can convince myself that something entirely different happened.

We all do this to some extent. We will continue to do this. And so I would encourage us all to remember as best we can. Remember the positive. Don't distort anything too much, or remnants of the true experience may disappear almost entirely.

Because, the experiences are gone. The memories replace the experiences. And to a certain extent, these memories are all we have. Remember well.