Meet Nat the Nit…
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?
Don’t ask me that question. One of my earlier memories is a particularly traumatic lesson at a new school I had just moved to. The exercise was to write 3 paragraphs, the first on your earliest memory, the second about you in the present and the third about what you think your future will be like.
I had NO PROBLEM with 2 or 3 but the first I had no idea. When you are 7/8 you don’t really catalogue memories in the same way an adult would. And anyway I struggled to remember what I did the week before, let along years before and to then decide which memory was the oldest. It felt like an impossible task.
The thing with memories is that they aren’t indexed. There’s no list of memories which you can browse through. These things are triggered by events or by a meandering train of thought firing up old synapses and bringing them back to life for a few moments. There has to be a reason for a memory to be triggered by a phrase and when the phrase is “Your earliest memory” it’s not necessarily going to trigger your actual earliest memory.
In my case that phrase triggers memories of this event at school. I did not enjoy it. My teacher did not understand why I was having so much trouble with it and got quite irate with me. Bad times.
