I was recently trying to dig deep into my brain box and find my first memory, it’s something everyone has done, and can be a rewarding but sometimes frustrating exercise.
So I decided to ask people on Twitter what they could find at the back of their minds, and wasn’t disappointed. I was sent over four hundred earliest memories. Some were funny; some were sad; some were surreal; some were very emotional; and some were about feeding spiders to frogs.
It’s thought that when you hit the age of seven, all previous memories fade away in what Freud referred to as “childhood amnesia” (Being Freud, he explained this as a method of suppressing sexual urges in infants, because of course he did.)
While some adults don’t recall much before seven, there are many exceptions.
Snapshot memories, or “flashbulb memories,” from as young as two are relatively common. These are usually formed after an event that combines surprise, a high level of consequentiality and emotional excitement.
The importance of a ceremonial rite of passage can be understood by a two-year-old.
There were several memories of the first two years of life.
Three people told me they remembered being born.
Half of the memories involved physical trauma. Perhaps the human mind needs to be violently jolted into existence, whether that be by taking a golf club to the head…
…or being stabbed with a fork.
Violence does have a way of sticking with you. If I asked you to remember one moment from Goodfellas, I bet it would involve Joe Pesci’s creative use of a pen, not the Christmas party.
Interestingly, the trauma was often combined with a very warm, fond emotion, such as comedy…
…love…
…and joy.
Maybe that combination of pain and love is the recipe that propels us, face first, into consciousness.
Some remember the moment they became self-aware.
Doctors, hospitals and being diagnosed with diseases also came up a lot.
Then came the acute embarrassment.
In one of my first memories I was five, at school. I remember the bell ringing for recess and running out of the classroom in an attempt to be the first kid to play in the yard—a daily race. I sprinted to the middle of the playground and happily noticed that I was way ahead of the competition. It was halfway through my victory dance that I realized it was raining hard and not one other child had left the classroom. In my rush to get outside, I had missed the announcement that it was a rainy indoor play day. My celebratory jig turned into a wet mortified stare as I looked up and saw twenty five-year-olds pointing and laughing at me from the warmth of the classroom.
I’m apparently not the only one whose earliest memories were born out of shame. Is there anything more tragic than the crushing of youthful exuberance with embarrassment?
Memories of pregnant moms or the arrival of younger siblings were very common.
Some people remember epiphanies, such as when you realize that you’ll, um, never need a glass of water again.
It’s bizarre how indelible the sight of a fanged Michael Jackson in a rad red leather jacket was.
Everyone has a yearning for nostalgia, life feels safer there, especially when those dreamy remembrances are juxtaposed with the unending shit tornado of the trump years.
As we get older we forage further and further back, trying to spend more hours in that warm, sepia-tinged past. There’s something so sad in attempting and failing to grasp an image or voice from your first years, but also something beautiful. Often the memory gets burnt into a single view, a photograph, to the point where you can’t remember if it was ever a memory at all. Maybe sometimes that can be for the best.
One or two remembered moments that were unfathomably sad. I was very thankful for people sharing.
It’s mind bending to think about which seemingly random moments can earn a permanent home in the brain. My daughter just turned six and over the last year I have been thinking about how any passing day could form her first memory. A fleeting second riding her scooter at sunset, or falling over the dog, could burn deep in her mind and stay there forever.
This was poetic and heartwarming.
Finally, my favorite, it’s both vivid and heartbreaking. I’d pay to watch this movie.
Thanks to everyone who shared these with me.
What is the first thing you remember?
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Aarti Shahani, technology reporter at NPR. More coming soon, so stay tuned!
