I've got this silly issue of forgetting what made me do certain things unless I consciously try to remember it - otherwise the true reason eventually gets lost behind the kinds of reasons I give people when they ask me about it
(though I suppose that isn't so uncommon, at least the process itself: just something people do without being aware of it?)
Like with Japanese I always tell people that I saw it at the bottom of a list of hardest languages to learn for a westerner and decided to challenge myself on it, and sometimes I'd almost believe that story myself, if I didn't have memory of how the first time I was asked about it I just spontaneously remembered having seen a list like that and mentioned it on a whim
Mhm the issue with these sorta questions is that it's too easy to give an interesting sounding answer - before I know it I'm saying something like "I guess I was always interested in creative endeavors; I'd value a work more the further disconnected it was from real life while still managing to connect itself via a consistent thread to the world we know - Japanese just struck me as a means to reach further "out" than the languages I knew would let me, probably because of the impressions anime left on me."
It'd be nice to argue that just by virtue of having come up with a reason like that I could comfortably claim it as one of mine, but confidence in that fact gets lost, for lack of better phrasing, when you know that what you were thinking while writing that out was just how to intrigue the reader.
The more I think about my "reasons" the more pseudo-motives I come up with. It's like I'm diluting myself or something, stretching myself across more and more made up reasons.
Hell, knowing myself I'd unconsciously reject any uninteresting yet true motive just due to not wanting to acknowledge it. That I could still live with actually, if only it didn't make it this difficult to stick to one modus, to be true to one "fake," instead of flipping between personae without feeling any attachment to any of them.
That's what I meant with the conscious remembering at the start. Whenever I tackle something new these days, like a book, a skill to learn, making new acquaintances and so on, I make a sort of mental snapshot of the impression I originally held at the time, with the idea that it'll allow me to keep track of, well, the truth of myself, trifling it may be. A sort of anti-measure to giving my
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