Remembrance of things past

[liv]

mrissa posted a thought-provoking poll about memory and sense of self. I don't know mrissa well enough to post a long rambling comment to her poll when I just happened to find it by linksurfing, so I am bringing her questions here. And answering them in prose rather than with just numbers. Please do feel free to add your own answers or repost this.

What age were you for the first thing you remember?
The first thing I remember clearly is my next brother Screwy's birth (which was a home birth), when I was exactly 2 years and 2 months. I remember sense impressions, not just the narrative of what happened, so I'm pretty sure it's a real memory, not a story I was told by my parents. Although I went on remembering it as my First Memory for so long that it may be a memory of a memory by now. A lot of the people commenting to Mris' post gave similar answers; the birth of a sibling is fairly clearly both a memorable and dateable event.

For what age do you start to have fairly consistent memories?
I remember quite a lot about being three, and my memory of being four isn't much worse than my memory of being fourteen or twenty-four. I think that was when my life started to have some kind of structure, I was going to pre-school and doing active things of my own choosing, not just being lugged around by my parents with one day of eating, playing and being taken care of blending into another. I'm fairly confident that by the time I was four I was "telling stories", turning my experiences into narrative which I tend to remember even if the event itself has faded. But I am not one hundred percent confident this isn't retrofitted from later in life.

At what age did you make friends with the person who is currently your longest-term friend?
The person I've known the longest is jacquic, whom I met when I was five. But for most of the time we've been acquaintances who like eachother rather than actual friends. The person I've been friends with longest, in the sense of making specific effort to spend time together and keep up with eachother's lives, and talking about is more than small talk, is blue_mai, whom I met and made friends with when we were twelve.

Although many people look back on secondary school as a time of social agony, I made a large number of good friends between the ages of 12 and 20, and I'm still close with many of the people I met then. I wasn't wildly popular at school, but the few friends I did make at that age, including many outside the school context, were really good friends. Some of them I've stayed in touch with properly, others are people I would be glad to spend time with if we happened to run into eachother.

(I'm not counting my sibs here, because although we are friends, and obviously have known eachother for a long time, I would say that are relationships are primarily sibling relationships and being friends is secondary, or came later. But I have no problem with people who say that their oldest friends are parents or sibs.)

At what age would you say you got to be "yourself," more or less as you currently see yourself?
This is a hard one, because it's trivially true that everyone keeps on changing throughout life, and I'm also fairly clear in my mind that there is a continuity between my past self and my present self. At ten I started feeling like a person and had a sense that I was someone with my own interior life. Before that point I didn't really have a sense of identity at all, if I thought about it at all I felt myself to exist as something that belonged to my parents and was generally acted upon rather than acting.

In my mid-teens, I think around fourteen or so, I became less selfish and more open to making real emotional connections to others, and more of a well-rounded person with interests beyond the ones that were obviously expected of me. That seems like the beginning of the process of what I would think of as becoming an adult. I think that process stabilized when I was about twenty; at nineteen I went through a kind of emotional crisis to do with being reluctant to "grow up", but I think by the end of it I had a clear personality which is very clearly related to who I am today.

I'm a little suspicious of this narrative cos it fits so neatly with what's expected in our culture: under tens are barely more than animated objects, teenagers are confused with moments of maturity and moments of childishness, and people in their early twenties are adults in charge of their own lives. I don't think this progression is at all universal, but it does seem to work for me.

Well, that was more interesting to think about than the average meme! Any responses?

Comments

[simont]

Mmm. Memes like this are interesting, aren't they? They often challenge one to look back at one's life from a new angle. I almost never post memes myself, but when I have done, they've been of this sort.

For me, I think, it all started at age nine. I do have quite a few memories from before then, but there have been times in the past when I was unable to recall any of them (rather disturbingly, they all came back one spring afternoon in 1999, so I rapidly dived for a text editor to write them all down before I forgot again). What's special about age 9 for me, I'm pretty sure, is that that's when I moved from a bog-standard local primary school to a weird primary school for clever kids1; the new academic demands on me from that forced me to kick my brain into high gear from its previous customary idle, and at the same time forming a dangerously strong unrequited crush on a fellow pupil presented me with a whole new class of problems inside my own head to begin dealing with. In response to those two pressures, I was hastily forced to start thinking seriously a lot of the time, and also introspecting heavily; my general feeling has always been that that explains why my memories are far clearer from that point onwards – it's simply because I was paying much more attention.

My actual earliest memories are from age two; they're fairly fragmentary and involve a book, a dream and a conversation or two. I have decently consistent memories from starting school onwards, so I fear that the wording of the second poll question would have forced me to select "5", but I would have felt that the really important threshold was not the one asked for there, and was four years later for me.

I couldn't in all honesty say I was still actively friends with anyone I knew before university, although there are a few of my school friends with whom I'm sporadically in touch or who now know people I know. I did, on the other hand, meet up last weekend with someone I met at the weird school when I was nine, and we had an excellent natter that I think made both of us feel as if in spite of spending the previous ten years completely out of touch with each other we'd been effortlessly able to just pick up where we left off.

I think that, although there have been events since then that have made noticeable changes to my personality or attitudes, I would have to say that for exactly the same reasons again age nine was when I became someone I would recognise as essentially me. Me before I learned a number of important life lessons, of course, but still me in spite of that.

---

1. I don't mean to say that it was weird because it was for clever kids. It went far beyond the call of duty in weirdness :-)

[liv]

Ooh, interesting response, thank you. I like memes that prompt people to post details of their lives or discuss topics that they might not otherwise think of, I'm not so interested in the ones where you input your name as a seed and get a random answer, or quizzes that regurgitate what you told them with a picture to represent your category.

That's very interesting that academic and social challenges made you more introspective. I think I've always been pretty introspective, I lived in my head a lot as a very young child. I also didn't really have to tackle anything that stretched me intellectually until about sixth form, but from age 8 to 12 I had to extend a lot of effort in order to convince my peers I was a girl enough to avoid bullying. I did also tend to push myself a lot; even if I could get full marks with little effort, to keep myself from getting bored I'd read textbooks aimed at a higher level or go beyond what was required by the school system.

I think the getting to be yourself question is a bit awkward as posed, because it seems more like a process than a single event. I think I began that process at around 10 and completed it (though allowing for further development and experience and so on) at around 20, and it's not that obvious whether the question wants the beginning or the end.

It's not very obvious how "longest-term friend" is defined, but I think having fairly open-ended questions makes the meme more interesting. Many of the people I met before uni and still regard as friends are people that I really "made friends" with later on, I just happened to move in the same circles as them for a continuous time. But I can recognize what you're saying about people that you can happily spend time with or take a vague interest in, even if you're not actively friends by now.

[simont]

That's very interesting that academic and social challenges made you more introspective.

I've tended to attribute the introspection to the emotional problems in particular. I had previously not paid a great deal of attention to the inside of my own head because it hadn't seemed necessary; but once it started actively causing me trouble, it suddenly seemed obvious that in order to make the problem go away I would first have to understand it, so I started observing carefully and keeping mental (and occasionally written) notes.

[nanaya]

Wow, that's a really good meme. I may have to do it myself.

[ephemera]

"What age were you for the first thing you remember?"

I remember walking down a steep hill at the seaside with my little brother in a pram, which means I must have been 3 or 4, but I'm not 100% sure that that's a real memory.

"For what age do you start to have fairly consistent memories?"

Fairly late - 10-ish? Late junior school, anyway, although I have flashes from 6+

"At what age did you make friends with the person who is currently your longest-term friend?"

11. We weren't in any of the same classes or groups, but we both loved animals, and met each other via walking Pippa, one of the teacher's dog. I'm now godmother to her son, and she's really my second sister.

"At what age would you say you got to be "yourself," more or less as you currently see yourself?"

I think I've always been me. Lots of learning, lots of evolving, but my core *self* I can see in my earliest memories, and in family stories.

[liv]

Ooh, hello, it's really interesting that you picked this post to comment on, thank you! It's also lovely that you really kept up this friendship with Pippa and became like sisters. I had a friendship in my teens that I thought would be like that, but it didn't quite work out, sadly. Not that I'm complaining, as an adult I have lots of really wonderful friends.

The getting to be yourself question has such a fascinating range of different answers! Everything from ones like yours of being sure you've always been you, to people who regard themselves as an entirely separate person from a few years ago. I'm somewhere in between; I do have a sense of continuity of experience, but feel much more connection with myself of the past ten years than before that. I'm really interested to see how I'll feel when I'm 50; will 30 seem as distant as 10 does now, or is the difference I perceive the transition from child to adult?

[naath]

I don't remember. No, really, my memory sucks hugely and really isn't tied into dates/ages at all. There are a few snapshots I can bring to mind of what must have been primary school aged me, but I can't order them. I find it kinda weird that other people have this kind of consistent, ordered memory.

I don't recall my brother's birth at all; I've got nothing in my head connected to his joining the family (I was 2 and a half). I have some snapshots of him as a young child.

[liv]

I do sometimes forget that memory can vary so much for different people. It's such a big part of being me that I can remember most of my life pretty well, that it's hard to imagine having a more patchy memory. So yes, we're both weird to eachother, but sometimes comparing experiences can help!

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

i want to reply to this in a more considered way, but dunno when that'll happen so it's another rush-ramble from me...
earliest memory - i said under 2, but i think that was wrong. i have an isolated memory of being carried into my parents dark bedroom and my cot being by the wall. i must have been quite small, but i may have made the whole thing up. i have proper consistent memories from infants school, and a few from nursery. i have a pretty good memory for junior and secondary school in general, i remember those people much better than people i met more recently.
i'm rather proud to be your longest-term friend :) mine is obviously A, since we technically met in maternity ward and have been friends since nursery. i think my best friend when i was very small was F - i distinctly remember being quite disappointed on the first day of infants school when i realised she wasn't going to be there.

as for becoming myself.. well i think i was a bit of a brat when i hit secondary - it was a reaction to the shock of the new environment compared with my junior school, and of course, being ten. but i did realise this within a year or so, and that was a significant moment of self-awareness.
i became rather independent-minded by the time i was 13, choosing to make friends outside of school, which rules (social, familial and legal)to follow and being aware of not having to fit in etc. i think i was fairly mature from then til end of 6th form, but my personal development went on hold (actually more like backwards) for the next two years - caused by the trauma of university. (i sound so pathetic...!). so then i only picked it up again in 3rd year and slowly since then i've been catching up with growing. i tend to learn/develop through doing/not-thinking and then reflection at some distance, in that way living abroad was a good measure for me.