This was supposed to be a reddit post

This was supposed to be a Reddit post on the r/personalmandela but I have a decent holster but still I would like it to exist in the ether so here we are.

I would like the record to reflect that, for the most part, I am not a crazy person. In my truth of truths, I know that the Mandela Effect is likely the result of a bunch of factors, like the fallibility of memory and how we're all humans, so our brains are likely to bend things in a similar way. That’s why some people remember Berenstain instead of Berenstein or Curious George with a tail instead of without one, and the rest of these incidents one way or the other in any number of combinations. It’s basically that famous dress meme but grafted onto each of these weird instances where we’re forced to answer, is it white or gold or blue and black? Whatever it is, it’s most likely a matter of happenstance and perspective than anything else. 

But occasionally, I spiral into absolute conspiracy because there’s one thing I cannot reconcile— a matter of personal history where my certainty matches someone else’s. The lack of concrete evidence drives me mad. Unlike these larger collective Mandela Effect experiences that I can solidly logic myself out of by Googling, there are some things I cannot verify, and not being able to really makes me question my sanity. For example:

I have the most distinct memory of seeing the movie Arrival with my dad at the off-brand dine-in movie theater a couple of minutes away from my parents’ house when it came out in theaters. The movie is vaguely about parent-child relationships and reminded me a lot of the movie Contact— a comparison I remember making to my dad— another one of my favorite movies that my dad introduced me to in 8th grade. (There’s this whole side story with my dad about Carl Sagan and how he took an astronomy course where Sagan was the professor, and he got an A, which I have fact-checked because he still has the transcript, so the memories surrounding Carl Sagan related media, the movie Contact, things in relation to the movie Contact, etc. are pretty salient. He literally tells that story all the fucking time so )  

At the end of the movie, I started to cry, and I glanced up at my dad to see if he saw me. I had gone into the movie totally blind and was caught off guard by the plot. I was surprised to learn that my dad wasn’t as thrown as I was when we spoke about it after. He said he had read a too-thorough review online and knew what to expect. I LOVED the movie— it ended up being a huge theme in a thesis I would go on to write in grad school— which is why I can recall, very clearly, being shocked when my dad said that it was good but that he was less impressed by it. Usually, our tastes are pretty similar. Oh well. It’s still on my letterboxd top four. 

Fast forward to this past June, almost six years later— my dad texts me asking me if I've ever seen this movie "Arrival." We go through this whole back and forth about seeing it together, and I'm convinced we had. I went through all my notebooks and ticket stubs I haphazardly saved just to prove we did, but I couldn't find anything. I asked him to look at his credit card statements, but either his didn't go back that far, or he no longer had the card he would have used to purchase the tickets. (It’s also possible that he’s just lazy and didn’t feel as compelled to do a deep dive into this as I was, so he just said he wouldn’t be able to find anything. I could fact-check if it was the statement or the credit card that stopped him from looking into it by going through my texts but I, too, am lazy. ) 

As convinced as I was that we had seen it together, my dad was equally convinced that we hadn't. He finished the movie and said he, without a doubt, had not seen it before. There was not even a flicker of recognition. And it's not like he has a declining memory-- he's still a practicing lawyer and loves science fiction movies, so he's not particularly inclined to forget about them. On top of that, the movies we’ve gone to together, just the two of us, are few and far between, so they usually stick out as events. He also remembers the rest of the movies that I remember seeing together, so at least we can agree on that.

The weirdest part of it all is that when I finally put to rest this huge discrepancy and asked him what he thought of the movie, the review he gave was basically the same as the one I remember him giving to me in the parking lot outside of the theater.

In 99% of cases involving a dispute of personal memory, I just assume that I'm an idiot who can't remember or that the other person is an idiot who can't remember, but in this case, I don’t really know what to believe. Even now, as I write it out, I’m worried I’m conflating things or making things up. Like, we saw Interstellar together at an AMC dine-in theater I worked at by our old house ten years ago. It was my dad’s first time seeing it and my second. I fell asleep in the theater and woke up to the big wave on the ocean planet. My dad told me that he would travel through space and time for me too, like Matthew McConaughey did for Murph. He liked Interstellar. That memory is also very distinct for me, but could I just be mixing it up with Arrival? Did I just see Arrival by myself? But then, as soon as I begin to doubt myself, I remember arguing with my dad about Arrival in the parking lot, and I’m thrown all over again. 

Has something similar to this ever happened to anyone else? How do you deal with it? Should I see a neurologist? Should this even matter to me? Why do we let eyewitnesses testify in trials without any corroborating evidence is this kind of shit can happen to us? As that narrator from the Mr. Owl tootsie pop commercial used to say— the world may never know.