The five different versions of someone living in your head at once.

The person who raised you, the person who exasperated you at twenty, the person who surprised you last year by being genuinely helpful — these can all be the same human being, and you can be holding all three versions at once, none of them overwriting the others, ready to surface depending on what triggers them.

Memory is organized by period, not by person

Martin Conway and Christopher Pleydell-Pearce's model of autobiographical memory describes it as structured into lifetime periods, each carrying its own dominant relationships and self-concept.¹ A long relationship spans several of these periods, and each period tends to leave behind its own semi-independent version of that person, rather than feeding into one continuously updated file.

Confident recall of one version doesn't rule out another being wrong

Ulric Neisser's study of John Dean's memory found detailed, sincere, and demonstrably inaccurate recall of a long-running set of interactions.² The lesson generalizes: several internally confident versions of a person can coexist in memory without ever being checked against each other, let alone against what's actually true of them now.

Which version shows up depends on what triggered it

Bowlby's internal working models are activated contextually, not chosen deliberately³ — which means an old setting, an old topic, or a moment of stress can load a years-old version of someone with no signal that the wrong file just opened. You're not being unfair on purpose. You're responding to whichever version got cued.

Being aware that multiple versions exist is the first step toward noticing which one is running at any given moment — and toward giving the most recent, most accurate version more say than the loudest or oldest one. See also the version of you that shows up with your parents and people, not topics, are the unit of a life.