Making sense of past selves

[mrissa]

ksumnersmith and porphyrin can tell you that when I was sick at World Fantasy Con, I was periodically giggling like a maniac about a Sesame Street I haven't seen in at least two decades. It's the bit where Ernie is eating cookies in his bed, and Bert tells him not to, so..."Ernie! What are you doing?" "I'm eating cookies in your bed, Bert!"

This was not due to my fever. It came up because I was eating crackers in the hotel's bed, Bert, but I find it funny even at 98.6 F or slightly lower. I found it funny when I was 3 or 4, and I find it funny now.

The other day, dichroic pointed out that some people might see it as a put-down to point out that something was their favorite poem when they were 7. (This entry here, with Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Recuerdo." Good poem, go read.) And that just seemed like such a horrible thing to me, to use your own affection for something as a weapon against someone else, or to act like your past self was a worthless self.

"Recuerdo" is not my favorite poem now because I know a lot more poems (and thus don't have one favorite), but I still love the things I loved about it then: the rhythm, the characterization, the worldbuilding. The dripping sun.

There are things I used to love and do not now love, but I respect what I felt for them then, and why. I still make sense to myself in retrospect -- I know what I was thinking, even if I have reasons not to think it now. I think this may be part of why I get along with a lot of the kids I meet: I assume that they're sensible people whose opinions matter, and that that isn't inconsistent with being people whose opinions may well change radically in the next two months, say nothing of two decades. The things they love now matter now, and will matter to the people they become. I expect to keep going from here. I do not always expect, for example, to be on a Dorothy Dunnett kick, or to like the looks of my current favorite shirt on my body. I might always, but I don't expect it, and that's okay. We appreciate what we can when we can. Adults don't have to prove their distance from childhood. If anything, our proximity to it is probably more worth attending to.

Comments

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this. I have vivid memories going back to INFANCY - and when I've tried to express something relative to this, people either discount the memory totally or act as though something is wrong with me for holding onto "silly" memories that they feel should be replaced by more "mature" ones. Though I don't have the narration typical in my older memories (probably because I was preverbal, so everything was jibberish at the time), I can remember situations in which I was in a diaper, and being breastfed, etc. I know that I love the sight of a thin white curtain fluttering at an open window in the afternoon breeze, and I know that it's related to memories of the very few times I felt content and safe was while I was lying in my bed as an infant at our scary house on Lehigh Street. Rather than replacing that memory of safety and contentedness with something more "mature," I have hung a thin white embroidered baby sheet at our small bedroom window, and I leave that window open now when I nap. My bed is in the same relative position today as my baby bed, and there is nothing that puts me in a better frame of mind than waking to see my curtain fluttering in just the same way from the same angle. It really makes a huge difference in my mood, and I'm so grateful to have such a simple and easily-reproducible way to create a feeling of calm and peacefulness in my home.

I liked that Sesame Street skit, too. I'm glad to see such an intelligent and respected friend write about this sort of thing. I've gotten so much criticism for being "goofy" because I quote old cartoons and Jason and I still laugh about old Sesame St. skits. People really don't give little kids enough credit as intelligent beings. Yes, our humor changes with our worldview, but that doesn't make what we laughed at back then any less funny now when we think of it. Sometimes I laugh at myself for WHY I thought it was funny, and that makes it an even more endearing memory.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In my experience, silliness is at least mildly correlated with intelligence. And high-quality silliness is highly correlated with intelligence: we have more of a range of stuff to be goofs about! We can be goofs about Ernie and Bert and medieval engineering devices all in the same conversation!

The idea of replacing memories doesn't make any sense to me. It's not like your early memories are in a filing cabinet that's getting too full, and you're going to forget what to do at work because you remembered the way the curtain blew in the wind. Memories enhance each other. People are silly about this kind of thing, and I'm glad you didn't let them talk you out of having your bed the way you've always liked it.