askchapo

i was always conscious.. but i don't remember when i became aware that i was conscious

I kinda remember just waking up one morning and thinking "oh, well this definitely feels different" and I guess that's when the internal monologue started.

When i witnessed my parents arguing on a black and white checkerboard tile of the bathroom

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

Can we even consider ourselves conscious before reading Marx?

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

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.

I literally can't remember a thing

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

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.

I remember me cuddling my childhood cat as a kitten at like age 2

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.

CW: childhood trauma

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.

At 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th, 1997.

In a panic, they tried to pull the plug.

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.

My earliest clear memory, I think, is of going "into the mountain" with my dad. Where we lived when I was 3-4, there was a "mountain" in the middle of town. It wasn't actually a mountain, more like a really tall cliff, but that's what everyone called it. You could drive or walk up to the top and look out over the whole town. I remember, one time, only going up part-way, and entering a cave system where you could walk to a few different "holes" in the side of the cliff, that also looked out over the city.

Except, I went back around when I was in college, and there is no such cave system. My dad confirms, there never was. So, apparently, my earliest memory is false.

The earliest memory I have that's TRUE (as far as I know) is a little later, playing doctor, wherein I helped my dad give birth to 3 stuffed animals, who I then named Peter, Emily, and Raisin Bran.

casually around three... then fully after getting hit in the head w a baseball bat at 6

First time I have proper memories was nursery so 3-4 I remember standing off by the side watching all the other kids wondering why they were able to have fun so easily.

Earliest earliest memory i don't know if they actually were earlier but some vague concept of falling down the stairs and my parents watching the old war of the worlds movie. I have a lot of memories of my first ever nightmares but not sure when those happened.

Oh oh one actually did pop into my memory i was 2 i think maybe older idk but was potty training and i decided to sniff my poo and then vomitted i was a genius. Sniffing my poo made me sentient

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.

Hasn't happened yet and I don't exoect it to anytime soon

I remember being like 2 or 3 in a stroller, but for when I got it and it never stopped I just remember waking up one day

I had to be around 3, which is as far back as my memory goes.

I just remember being with my dad out shopping, this was around Christmas-time too we were getting some shopping done and about to go home to make Pizzelle cookies for the mailmen and garbagemen as a “thank you” gift for their services.

Tossing myself into a fountain at the mall when I was 2 or 3. I was throwing a penny in and didn’t let go.

I had earlier memories, but those are a different story.

I was sitting in my buggy on the way to the supermarket with my mom. I was definitely able to walk, I just liked being pushed around in my buggy. I think I was 3.

First proper memory is from when I was 3 and had to forever relinquish my pacifier in a large plastic tube in a Christmas theme park in the middle of summer.

Was a great injustice, but then I got to go to a dinosaur theme park, so all was good again.

Otherwise I just remember vague snippets like being very scared of a sheep.

My first memory was falling in the pool. I was probably conscious for some time before then, just not making memories.

I have continuous memory and selfhood from a month or two before my third birthday, with increasingly vague flashes going back to I guess 18 months (from external verification of the event).

It's hard to say if I had consciousness in the early memories (though I definitely had some sort of agency) but I definitely had it going into my third birthday.

My first memory is in the maternity hospital a few hours/days after birth when I pooped myself and fell off a bed. I remember a nurse washing my ass in the sink

You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!

I have some extremely foggy memories of my parent’s wedding when I was 2.

Uh I think I was crawling in a waiting room at a doctor's office. At least that's the earliest memory I remember.