I haven't yet.
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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
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
Couple minutes ago. Can't say I'm a fan of gestures generally
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.
My OHs mum had a conversation with her mum in a butcher at roughly the same age. Must have been interesting to say this would have been about 1953 in northern England…in a pit village. I wouldn’t call it particularly progressive now.
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…
I literally can't remember a thing
Thats because youre a npc in the elder scrolls oblivion
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 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
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.
I remember me cuddling my childhood cat as a kitten at like age 2
When I was the same age we had two cats. I used to lie next to them by our fireplace winking at each other.
The cats were mother and daughter, I think one got hit by a car and one ran away.
That's too cute
At 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th, 1997.
In a panic, they tried to pull the plug.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Relatable. This sounds like autism to me. My limited early memories (not the first) are this way too. Felt like an outsider my entire life, still do.
Yeah i got the tism found out in my late 20s but would have been useful to know earlier cos I spent my entire childhood feeling like an alien and beating myself up about it
I never got diagnosed, my best friend since I was 1 who worked with autistic people diagnosed me in my mid 20s and I was very offended. Then a whole bunch of life crisis stuff happened in my mid 30s and I looked into it for real this time, took a bunch of online tests out of curiosity and there it was, autistic. It explains so much of what’s “wrong” with me and why I can’t just be like everyone else.
I’m female so a lot of shit just gets swept under the rug especially growing up in the 90s where females can’t have neurodivergence it’s a disruptive rich white boy problem (in america).
Given the timeline america is on I don’t want an official diagnosis, it won’t give me anything but more trouble. And I’d have to pay handsomely for the pleasure of opening myself up to discrimination and worse.
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.
Hasn't happened yet and I don't exoect it to anytime soon
casually around three... then fully after getting hit in the head w a baseball bat at 6
damn, that's one way to do it
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
I have some extremely foggy memories of my parent’s wedding when I was 2.
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
Uh I think I was crawling in a waiting room at a doctor's office. At least that's the earliest memory I remember.
The earliest thing I can remember perceiving is a diaper change at maybe age 2 if not slightly earlier, but it's vague and passive. Similarly I recall sitting in a restaurant and watching the server. The earliest time I remember feeling agency was age 3. Either my mother's cat being angry at me, rolling down a hallway in a bouncy thing, playing under a pear tree, or a vivid lucid nightmare where I made the decision to walk down stairs using the same internal thought process I have now.