Androgynous histories

It's difficult to do archaeology on your own former self, like studying an ancient settlement people have continually lived on and built over. I have some memories of the people I used to be, but they're partial, selective, and already in the context of the narratives that are explanatory to me now. Things that didn't matter to me, that contradicted me, that I didn't realize, are all elided. Without external landmarks with which to orient myself -- public records, intersubjective corroboration, things I wrote down at the time -- it would be close to impossible to check or complicate these memories, but even with those things available there is so much in my relationship to them I have to guess at, what I was unable to acknowledge or articulate at the time, or just forgot.

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