I became conscious while walking through LAX airport holding my moms hand as we approached a strange smiling man with an afro and handle bar mustache (turns out it was my father)
My earliest memory is watching my uncles and older cousins playing football at Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house when I was two. But my memory is very spotty and hard to place on a timeline until I started school, even then it’s crummy until about the age of 9
I also have a lot of gaps from the years 2011-2018 or so, yay trauma
Couple minutes ago. Can't say I'm a fan of gestures generally
wild that people have vivid memories so far back. i don't really have any proper episodic memory from before when i was 14 or 15, just vague flashes sometimes years apart. i think it's a trauma thing
Can we even consider ourselves conscious before reading Marx?
My earliest memory is coincidentally the same time I became vegetarian.
I was about 4, we just got a new puppy. I was eating a hot dog outside, it was late spring or maybe summer and my family was grilling in the backyard. I look at my dog, I look at my hot dog (knowing it was beef, not an actual dog), I look back at my dog, back at the hot dog, and I remember distinctly thinking this:
I’m not going to eat my dog so why would I eat a cow? Why are cows ok to eat but dogs aren’t? That’s it I’m not eating this ever again. Or any animal.
And in that moment I not only became a vegetarian but an anarchist as well, realizing that hierarchy is a bullshit concept at the ripe old age of 4. I was a weird fucking kid. Both parents ate meat, and my family tried to force me to eat animals for a number of years until they gave up.
That's such a fantastic and meaningful memory, I'm honestly jealous lmao
Aww thanks. What’s really cool is I get to tell the story pretty often. When people find out I’m vegetarian (I don’t advertise it but it comes up when ordering food or being offered food) they often question me about it - oh how long have you been vegetarian? - and I get to tell the story about how I’ve been a fucking anarchist since I was 4. When people find out my parents weren’t vegetarians too they lose their minds that a 4 year old could understand morals and ethics…
This question never made sense to me.
Like, "when we were 3 or 4," "some time after learning language sufficiently," "puberty," "this summer," and "between the 11th and 14th of this month" would all be correct answers.
I'm not sure if it's the moment I became conscious, but my earliest memory is my father holding and trying to calm me after I stuck some metal utensil into a power outlet
I remember all the hiding spots i had for hide and seek in the house i moved out of when i was 3. Other than that, the day my first dog came home at around that same age.
Eating pennies under a table.
Or having to get an enema from my parents because I was born with a condition where like a foot of my lower intestine just didn't have the muscles or whatever to push the shit along. So I was always literally full of shit as a kid and had to get surgery really young (like 2) so a lot of my memories are around going thru surgery. It's weird and makes it feel like I have some "medical experiment to make a super soldier gone wrong" backstory.
CW: childhood trauma
spoiler
One of my earliest memories is being held underwater in a tub because I needed to 'cool down'. No memory of what lead to that or after, but it wasn't great.
My first realization that this country was cooked came after Kosovo NATO intervention, I had been following on the radio (NPR in English mostly) and was both learning new vocabulary and getting disgusted by what I was hearing. I got sent to the principal and had my parents called into the school because we were tasked with drawing comic strips and I made a comic with a punchline that Bill Clinton was sending everyone to Yugoslavia as a distraction and to find him more interns to have sex with. Little did I know how right I was at 9 years old, but I still got in trouble for it.
My parents used to leave the news on basically all day, so i have some decent memories of the cbc reporting on the Bosnian War and the later Kosovo War. Wild way to learn english.
At 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th, 1997.
In a panic, they tried to pull the plug.
How do people remember this stuff? I could tell you some random vague memories from my childhood but I definitely don’t remember my literal first memory lol
I'm on the opposite side of this where i wonder how everyone forgets what being a child is like so easily. I could with relative ease recount a fair chunk of my life from about 4 to 18 although my memory has always been a bit odd
i think it's a trauma thing for a lot of people, i hardly have any concrete memories from before the age of 14 or so
Trust me I don't want LAX of all places to be my first memory, but the brain is weird sometimes
My earliest real memory was when I got casts on my hands/arms after getting my extra digits surgically removed(born with polydactyly). My casts went up passed my elbows and I had limited movement but was able to play with a black Tonka Truck I had.
