One of my favorite English professors always used to say “Just like gender and identity, memories are a construct." This basically means that the things that we think may have happened could look completely different to someone else. This happens a lot among family and friend relationships. There may be a “war” going on in a family over something that both sides thought happened, but it turns out that it was something completely different. Usually it is only one or two, maybe even a small group of people, who have slightly warped memories, but it’s strange when it’s more than half of the population.

As it turns out, a little more than half of America’s population has been remembering past events wrong. This collective memory fluke is called The Mandela Effect. This term was basically coined when Fiona Broome, an author and paranormal researcher, recalled a popular memory that was entirely wrong. Many believed that Nelson Mandela passed away back in the 1980s, but he really passed on in 2013. When I asked my mother and grandmother when he died, they said sometime in the 80s. This isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time that a collective group of people "misremember" something that did/didn’t happen.

The one that stumps me in particular is in Star Wars. Everyone basically knows that Darth Vader says, “Luke, I am your father,” but according to reports and the actual movie, he actually says, “No, I am your father.” This baffles me, because not only has America gotten it wrong, but even popular fiction, movies, and television have it wrong. It definitely doesn’t stop there.

Apparently, we’ve "misremembered" a lot of things about the past. This includes a movie about Sinbad as a genie, how to correctly spell “The Bernstein Bears,” how we forgot Oscar Mayer’s last name wasn’t Meyer, Curious George having a tail or not, and more. The one that gets me is the Snow White quote that we apparently all get wrong. For all of my life I thought that the step mother said, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Well, it turns out that I was wrong. Snow White’s step mother really said, “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” This could be something that we misdirected through other movies. DreamWorks’s "Shrek" had a magic mirror as well, but Lord Farquaad was the one to say “Mirror, mirror on the wall.” This has me thinking that over time, our memories may have been altered by other things that we have seen and witnessed.

Memory is definitely a construct and it is always changing based on outside forces and our own minds. Many people have theorized parallel universes mixing in with our own to create these memory fallacies, but maybe it’s just us. It is strange that so many people could "misremember" the exact same events from the past, but that’s how history goes. Someone usually changes up one or two small details, no one goes back to “fact check,” and then the generations that follow walk blindly in the path that their predecessors laid out before them. This challenges me, and I’m challenging you all, to look back over your memories and talk to others to see if what you remember is correct or not. You may end up being surprised that the mirror on the wall isn’t as magical as you remember.