My Cryptomnesia, Reinvention, and Why the Stories Feel Inevitable

I learned a new word recently. Cryptomnesia.

It’s a documented neurological phenomenon where a forgotten memory resurfaces and is experienced as a brand-new idea. Not plagiarism. Not déjà vu. A genuine belief that something has just been invented—when it’s actually been quietly waiting in the back rooms of the mind.

Writers live inside this state more than most people. But here’s the part that caught my attention.

Neurologists studying memory recall have found that people who reinvent themselves repeatedly—new countries, new identities, abrupt personal ruptures—experience cryptomnesia far more intensely than those with linear, uninterrupted lives.

The night I read this, I happened to be watching Michael Fassbender play a CIA agent pulled out of deep cover. Once returned to his life in London, his own agency monitors him relentlessly—phone tapped, apartment bugged, movements tracked—not because he’s unstable, but because reinvention itself makes a person unpredictable. Memory doesn’t reintegrate cleanly. Identities overlap. Old selves don’t stay buried. In the world of the CIA, that’s a security risk.

Which made something click.

The stories I write don’t feel constructed. They feel received. Contrary to my training, I don’t outline them into existence so much as recognize them when they arrive. Themes recur—reinvention, guilt, parallel lives, emotional echoes across time—not because I plan them, but because they present themselves intact. That isn’t mysticism. It’s neurology.

When a life contains rupture, memory doesn’t return intact. It mutates. Experiences rearrange themselves as narrative.Relationships reappear wearing different faces. Trauma reshapes into character arcs. Entire chapters of lived life slip into fiction, disguised as invention.

And most of the time, you don’t know it’s happening while it’s happening. This is why some writers gravitate toward nonlinear timelines without trying. Why certain stories feel inevitable rather than engineered. Why reinvention shows up again and again—not as theme, but as gravity.

It’s not a stylistic choice. It’s an operating system.

Most people will never access this kind of storytelling engine. It requires both depth and rupture—continuity and fracture. It requires having lived more than one version of a life, and not fully shutting the door on any of them.

If that sounds familiar, then the question isn’t where do the stories come from?

It’s why they keep finding you.