The Unreliable Narrator Living in Your Head

I don’t think we talk enough about the fact that memory is a storyteller. It selects. It edits. It adds connective tissue. It removes the dull parts. It keeps the emotional core and changes the furniture around it. Then it hands you the finished scene and says confidently: "This is what happened." Spoiler alert: it’s not.

That’s why two people can share the same evening and leave with different realities. If you ask two travelers about the same trip, you’ll get two different cities: one remembers light, the other remembers noise; one remembers kindness, the other remembers crowds. The narrator is the one who chooses.

A magic performance is one of the gentlest ways to meet this narrator. In the studio, there are moments when you’ll feel sure you saw something. Maybe you did, but maybe you haven’t. Using these moments of non-existent certainty, the story I am telling can change at the end, when the magic piece finally reveals itself. That’s when you realize that certainty was never proof. Certainty was your narrator doing its job too quickly.

Here’s the comforting part: an unreliable narrator isn’t a curse. It’s a reminder you can rewrite, too. If memory were perfect, you’d be trapped. You’d be chained to every awkward sentence you ever said, every wrong turn you ever took. The flexibility of narrative is how humans heal past experiences and move forward. We revisit the past and assign it new meaning. We turn a failure into a lesson. We turn a heartbreak into a doorway.

Part of being human is built on top of this flexibility. This doesn’t mean facts don’t matter. It means story matters too. In a world that weaponizes narrative, filled with ads and propaganda, I find it restorative to meet the narrator in a safe room, with a safe game. To watch it work. To laugh at it. To leave you more aware of the service the narrator is providing me, without me noticing.

If you want to watch your narrator rewrite in real time, reserve a seat at the Time for Magic studio performance in Porto.