You start your life by forgetting your past. All the times you fell over, were hungry or overtired, or shat your pants as a baby or toddler. You don’t remember that time unless something happened that’s traumatizing in the extreme. Somewhere between that age and when you start school you start retaining memories. Not all of them but enough to reminisce. You’re growing still so every day is a new experience and not everything makes the cut. And then you age. Once you cross 40 you’ll notice a lot more that you cannot remember why you went to the garage but you can remember all the teachers from your elementary school days. Most of your classmates too but that guy’s name in Accounting who you talk to every other day is nowhere to be found. And when you reach an age where death is becoming likely every day, you reminisce and you remember lots of stuff from ages ago but not what you had for breakfast. Dementia fucks with you but they remember their moody teenage music tastes and react more to that than their own offspring.
I remember breastfeeding, learning to crawl and walk
No way.
Howwww.
My earliest memory was something… I think was when I was like 3, I remember seeing photos dated 2005… (probably still in some drawers somewhere) so I was visiting Hong Kong from Guangzhou…
I think we went there to vacation(?) + meet with relatives from abroad in the US
I really only remember
cable cars
the hotel room that you need a special card thing to access and turn on the electricity in the room (I think it must’ve been some rfid thing)
Double-deck buses
Trolleys(?)
That’s about it
I remember it kinda feel “western”? (I mean of course it felt western after 99 years of british rule lol)
I think I already knew how to say basic words in Cantonese at this point so I remember asking a question about the weird rfid hotel card thing…
But like… nah how the f do you remember breastfeeding and being a toddler?
I have zero memories of pre-speaking age of myself.
I guess having a language make it easier to form memories? Or maybe vice versa? Being able to form memories make it possible to retain a language? Idk.
I have lots of memories from when I was a baby, a toddler. Mundane things, like sitting in a high chair eating Cheerios and drinking juice from a sippy cup, playing with my toys, crawling around the house. More impactful ones, like when my parents were trying to get me to walk, which I didn’t want to do, but couldn’t argue yet, so I kept attempting to show them that walking was foolish because I could crawl much faster. My first word, “trash,” which I picked up from watching my mother sort the mail, and initially thought applied to everything made of paper. How I figured out how to escape my drop-side crib, and would wander around the house at night while my parents slept. When my mother came home from the hospital with my younger sister and I first held her, and promptly dropped her, when I was just shy of 2. How jealous I was that my mother weaned me because of the new baby. Teaching my sister how to escape the crib, so she could play with me at night. Being angry that she wasn’t careful like me, and got caught escaping the crib. My first day of pre-school, which I desperately did not want to attend. Starting a fight in pre-school, I beat a boy with a wicker basket because he tried to play with the building blocks I was using.
You don’t need language to think, or form memories. Small children often are able to remember and recount these sorts of things, they just forget them as they age.
Oh, I just recalled a good one. A memory of a word from before I could speak.
My mother had gestational diabetes, and I was born a very large and fat baby. For the first few months of my life, my parents called me “Baby Huey,” a reference to a 1950s cartoon character. They stopped calling me that long before I could speak, and then forgot they ever had.
I brought this up later in my childhood, because I wanted to know what a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, the only Huey I knew about then, had to do with baby me.
You start your life by forgetting your past. All the times you fell over, were hungry or overtired, or shat your pants as a baby or toddler. You don’t remember that time unless something happened that’s traumatizing in the extreme. Somewhere between that age and when you start school you start retaining memories. Not all of them but enough to reminisce. You’re growing still so every day is a new experience and not everything makes the cut. And then you age. Once you cross 40 you’ll notice a lot more that you cannot remember why you went to the garage but you can remember all the teachers from your elementary school days. Most of your classmates too but that guy’s name in Accounting who you talk to every other day is nowhere to be found. And when you reach an age where death is becoming likely every day, you reminisce and you remember lots of stuff from ages ago but not what you had for breakfast. Dementia fucks with you but they remember their moody teenage music tastes and react more to that than their own offspring.
Memory retention is not a linear thing.
I remember breastfeeding, learning to crawl and walk, the intense frustration I felt while trying to communicate before I learned how to speak.
No way.
Howwww.
My earliest memory was something… I think was when I was like 3, I remember seeing photos dated 2005… (probably still in some drawers somewhere) so I was visiting Hong Kong from Guangzhou…
I think we went there to vacation(?) + meet with relatives from abroad in the US
I really only remember
That’s about it
I remember it kinda feel “western”? (I mean of course it felt western after 99 years of british rule lol)
I think I already knew how to say basic words in Cantonese at this point so I remember asking a question about the weird rfid hotel card thing…
But like… nah how the f do you remember breastfeeding and being a toddler?
I have zero memories of pre-speaking age of myself.
I guess having a language make it easier to form memories? Or maybe vice versa? Being able to form memories make it possible to retain a language? Idk.
I just never forgot.
I have lots of memories from when I was a baby, a toddler. Mundane things, like sitting in a high chair eating Cheerios and drinking juice from a sippy cup, playing with my toys, crawling around the house. More impactful ones, like when my parents were trying to get me to walk, which I didn’t want to do, but couldn’t argue yet, so I kept attempting to show them that walking was foolish because I could crawl much faster. My first word, “trash,” which I picked up from watching my mother sort the mail, and initially thought applied to everything made of paper. How I figured out how to escape my drop-side crib, and would wander around the house at night while my parents slept. When my mother came home from the hospital with my younger sister and I first held her, and promptly dropped her, when I was just shy of 2. How jealous I was that my mother weaned me because of the new baby. Teaching my sister how to escape the crib, so she could play with me at night. Being angry that she wasn’t careful like me, and got caught escaping the crib. My first day of pre-school, which I desperately did not want to attend. Starting a fight in pre-school, I beat a boy with a wicker basket because he tried to play with the building blocks I was using.
You don’t need language to think, or form memories. Small children often are able to remember and recount these sorts of things, they just forget them as they age.
Oh, I just recalled a good one. A memory of a word from before I could speak.
My mother had gestational diabetes, and I was born a very large and fat baby. For the first few months of my life, my parents called me “Baby Huey,” a reference to a 1950s cartoon character. They stopped calling me that long before I could speak, and then forgot they ever had.
I brought this up later in my childhood, because I wanted to know what a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, the only Huey I knew about then, had to do with baby me.