What Childhood?

Blog Post #3

I have a very hard time remembering my childhood. This was not a surprise to my therapist.

This is not to say I had a rough childhood. There is no history of abuse. I never had to worry about my (physical) needs being met. I was given a private school education. Although my parents were never married and lived separately before I even turned 1, I spent time with my mother and my father every week, and I spent special occasions with them together; they maintained a respectful environment for me.

Yet, I could probably tell you one or two memories per year of my childhood.

What I believe to be my earliest memory is this: a bright white interior of a house (possible from sunlight?), shiny white tile floors, an old woman (my babysitter) in a black dress with white polka dots, and her black labrador. I had to be three or four.

My next earliest memory is in pre-school. I had just come in from recess to discover the water cup on my desk had been knocked over and ruined my watercolor apple. I can't really picture this scene exactly, but I know it happened. I remember being very sad about it, maybe even crying. I can picture a row of desks with the row of painted red apples. (I find it odd I can't remember anything else from this day, or what even happened to my apple. I don't even remember painting it!)

Another early memory I have from around the same time, maybe a little later, is of sitting in a leaf pile with Blue Blue the golden retriever, one of our family dogs. Similarly, I know this happened, but I can't really remember it. I have no feeling of the leaves, of Blue Blue, of what our surroundings looked like. I know that my grandpa raked the leaves into a pile so we could jump into them.

There's a common theme to the childhood memories I do have, and you might have even picked it up from the examples above: animals. My earliest special interest, along with dinosaurs.

Family pets, Animal Planet episodes, SeaWorld, the local zoo, the black and white pictures of the elephants on the protestors' signs outside the circus, videogames involving animals like Zoo Tycoon and Nintendogs, the history museum, Monster Mutt, other people's pets, jumping out of my desk and under the computer desk to catch & release the moth in Ms. Ash's classroom so it wouldn't be killed — these are all things I can distinctly remember from my childhood.

A picture from when my Girl Scout troop went to Sea World.

But what about the rest of it?

Let's start with the lighter side first: sometimes, I just need a cue. Autistic brains often depend on some sort of connection or link to associate things with.

In kindergarten, my teachers traced the shadows of our side portraits as a gift for the parents. I had completely forgotten about this until I saw it hanging in my mother's house one day. Then, I could recall standing there in the flashlight, wanting to look over while the teacher traced but messing up the tracing since it was side profile, haha.

I think this is why I am so adamant about taking pictures. I know some people view phones as a disconnect from the moment, but for me, my phone is like a portal to my experience, a way to recall my feelings and key parts of an event. I store all of my pictures and selfies on a USB drive, organized in folders by year or special event.

Now, association doesn't contribute to all of my lost memories. This next bit is a bit darker.

When a brain experiences a traumatic event, it can tuck away things related to said event in order to protect itself. This is known as dissociative amnesia. It's more likely to happen when the trauma is severe or long-term.

Masking can be traumatic to the autistic brain.

Many of the other childhood memories I cannot access are blocked off due to an intense or prolonged session of masking. Times when I was told who I was wasn't acceptable, so I had to hide it. I probably disassociated. This certainly makes sense for my inability to recall much of my class time at my strict private school. I was also often scolded/shushed for intense emotions by the neurotypicals in the family.

To my fellow autistic reader, please take a moment to pause and comfort yourself. Wrap yourself in a nice blanket. Maybe have a warm tea, or if you're a heathen (that's a joke), a can of soda.

I like to think of my masked memories like the disconnected box in Wreck-it-Ralph.

They're there, somewhere in the darkness. With time, my therapist said I will be able to recall these memories and learn why they got blocked in the first place. (To be honest, I'm not sure if I care that much about it.)

My limited childhood memory probably relates to the emotional disconnect I have with most my family. Something I heard often while growing up is "I'm your parent not your friend." I also have a lot of memories of being lied to by my grandparents in order to try to avoid me crying, so they wouldn't have to deal with my outburst and console me.

And as I stated above, I was taught in a private school environment. While I'm glad for the stronger education as I love to learn new things, these environments are very heavily not neurodiversity friendly. At the moment, I don't have any memories of being punished in school, or at least what I did to deserve the punishment because I can say I missed out on recess at least a few times. I'm sure I was stimming or disinterested because the topics didn't relate to my special interest.

Just as autism itself is a spectrum, so is autistic memory. While most autistic people have some sort of buried trauma, there is still variety to memory in autistic people. Some autistics have extremely vivid memories from childhood.

I bet this also plays into how people visualize things in their mind. I always knew that when someone told a group of people to "picture a tree" that they would all see different trees, but what I didn't know until recently is that how they visualize the tree will also be different. Some people will see a 3D tree, others a 2D one; someone might picture drawing a tree, or someone may use their memory of a tree to visualize it. There's also people who just can't visualize in their mind, which is known as aphantasia.

What does your childhood memory/memory recall look like? Does it relate to your special interests?