What a question....
A fact by definition is "something that actually exists; reality; truth."
To dissect that, lets examine the part about reality and truth. As we discussed in class (and is really obvious) everybody has a different reality and a different truth... so does that mean that fact is subjective?
For example when I was telling my boyfriend about how when I was little I would have terrible nightmares and would run to my parents room, so my brother tied a broken stick to my parents door and when I went to open it I scratched my arm from wrist to elbow leaving a very fine scar. My mom who was in the room at the same time promptly called me a liar and told me it was from a biking accident as a child. I vividly remember the stick, it was blue, he'd found it in the yard, that was my reality, my fact, my truth but my mom's was entirely different.
It's also interesting to consider that your reality is affected by what you forget.
When I was 13 I started hallucinating (for lack of a better term) and I dealt with it until I was 16 and I had a breakdown and had to see a psychiatrist and then a therapist. After talking at length with my psychiatrist he called my mom in to talk to her about my childhood, as it turned out it had started at a much younger age and I had no idea. I started seeing things when I was 6 so I was never allowed to look at mirrors, all the mirrors in my house had posters taped over them. I couldn't sleep in certain rooms or on previously owned furniture...
My reality changed. Seeing things became something I had to take more seriously, not some passing phase.
My psychiatrist told me it was sleep deprivation and prescribed me ambien in it's beginning stages, a hallucinogen. It didn't help my seeing things, sometimes it made me see beautiful things and sometimes it made what I normally see even more terrifying. After a few weeks I just stopped taking them because it was such an awful experience, helping nothing, making everything worse.
After that I saw a therapist who told me I was an "earth mother" and due to my Native American heritage I could shift realities. Or that somehow my reality occassionally crossed with "theirs". The whole thing was shifty if I may say so.
Sometimes I think she's right, sometimes I think I'm slightly pschizofrenic, sometimes I think I make it up and I'm just such a good liar I believe myself.
Who really knows. The point is my reality changed a lot. My facts were all mixed up.
So, I guess, what makes a fact a fact... is belief. The bone deep belief in something. For whatever reason you know it to be true, it is your fact.
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You, like several others, connect fact with belief. Your brief exposition of your experience as a child helps your reader to understand why you would search for something firm in the way of belief -- and yet not be too sanguine about finding said something.
We can basically approach facts two ways: as immutable and solid, or as provisional and 'shifty". For the most part, experience will tend to point towards provisional interpretation of facts -- at the same time long experience also begins to suggest those matters and forces which remain constant. But these tend not to be what are generally thought of as "facts".
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