Do you remember your first memory?
My grandma has mine on a VHS tape that I've yet to live down. It's a video of me yelling at the top of my lungs that we were all trapped in a jail and didn’t realize it. I was about 4 years old living with her at the time and I had this crazy notion that I should be able to go down to the park to play. When she told me I couldn’t I started to panic and screamed that this was a jail, how could we not enjoy ourselves when we wanted?
Everyone says I was always a serious child. If my memory serves me though, every time I wanted to play I was given reasons why I couldn’t, why it wasn’t a good time.
I think in a way this set the tone for how much I engaged later in life.
I felt so limited in this reality, I just wanted to run around and play but every chance I tried it seemed like I hit a wall.
It wasn’t long before I stopped trying to play, stopped trying to open doors, I thought if it wasn’t open then I wasn’t meant to go through it.
Recently I've realized that by doing this I put myself in a box, I made my own jail cell and I didn’t even realize it.
I spent most of middle school and high school trying to figure out ways to escape my reality, to disassociate from the world I was in and plug into the reality I wanted. My complacency for my physical reality was real.
My mom had a knack for uprooting us every year and a half or so. I got so used to being told when, how, and why to do things that I just felt my opinion on things didn’t matter.
After some luckily failed suicide attempts I felt like I had something to do here, but since I felt like my choices in life were irrelevant I didn’t know how to embark on that.
I sunk into a deep depression in college that made me realize my coping mechanisms were no longer working.
I needed to figure out how to merge my fantasy with my reality. I needed to know that my waking moments meant something. This is when I started getting into my manifestation work, started delving into the magic I had always aligned with in my books and decided that I too could impact my reality.
I began being a lot more intentional with everything in my life. I saw every moment as a chance to make a choice, reinvent and redesign myself and my reality. I didn’t know what any of it was adding up to but I knew that if everyone else could leave a mark on the world and in my life then I could too.
This turned out a lot longer than I expected. However, I really wanted to show how such a small memory, can create a pathway for us that makes it so easy to go down a rabbit hole we never even realized we were going down.
I'm in the process of reprogramming and rewilding my experiences.
Going through my memories and realizing a lot of the assumptions I made from them no longer serve me.
What was your first memory like? Have you noticed if it impacted your personality or the way you interact with others in any way?