Early (altered) memories
An attempt to help the memory game of telephone for later and others
I’ve wanted to document my feelings and motivations at points in my life and through a decade of procrastination and some recent nudges I’m excited to start.
My original idea for making these posts was to write down beliefs and memories at different points in my life for future reflection. Hopefully, it’s helpful for others as well - a lot of these ideas circle around finding confidence which is a constant journey for most.
One of my earliest memories is a feeling of anger as my early childhood memories were going away. This post started as just a reflection on that memory, but I realized while writing that it lays the foundation for what I’m trying to achieve through these posts.
Did you realize that every time you remember something it can alter your later recall of the event?
I remember as a child realizing I was losing early life memories as I grew up. It’s hard to describe, but I knew at the time that I used to remember a certain time of my life and surrounding events and then they were just gone and inaccessible no matter how I tried to recall them. I remember feeling mad, frustrated, and confused about this.
This isn’t connected but I also had extreme frustration around naming the colors white and yellow. We laugh about this as a family now, but I don’t have any color blindness and I could not tell the difference between white and yellow. My mom would point at something white and I would just guess white or yellow with no idea if I was right. I don’t how old I was, but it was long after I was supposed to be able to tell the difference.
Someone’s probably going to read this and think I had some sort of head trauma or ate paint chips as a kid. I had stitches 10+ times, but there were no documented head injuries.
Maybe a neuroscience person will read this and shed light on what was happening, but I think my brain was developing in ways that punted early memories and I remember feeling angry about it.
This feels like an appropriate first post because my goal here is to capture my motivations and feelings at specific times in my life. I hope by having these documented the game of telephone described above will be less altered when I reflect on these later and maybe they’ll be helpful for someone finding confidence.
I’m excited to try to capture some of my memories and ideas so that I can at least have my present version of them documented for future reflection and move toward my current motivations, feelings, and ideas.
Publishing this tonight was helped by three things:
generally trying to have a bias toward action over the past few years. This post series is something I’ve wanted to start for at least 10 years
a book, Rework, we’re currently reading as a company (screenshot below). This has been one of the better business books I’ve read in a while
a walk with a friend, Rob (thanks Rob!), who nudged me to start writing
Here we go!
I’m really excited you are writing (and so well). I had no idea about the white / yellow challenges. I’m excited to see where this goes....you are already over the hardest step, publishing the first post!