Xuen Tey - Week #16 - Timelines

Most people’s minds seem to follow a linear pattern. This event happened, then this one and that one and on and on, with neat little dates, a sequence easily translated into a straightforward timeline from the distant past up until the present day. I’ve heard my friends easily tell me that a specific event happened in a specific year or date or time, and I have no idea how they do it.

I’ve mentioned my memory being like puzzle pieces, with different memories that have to be pieced together, but I never mentioned that I am terrible with puzzles. Even if I did have all the pieces, I would get terribly lost trying to organize them into what is at the start, what’s inbetween, and what is at the end. I’m not good at trying to organize past events. My childhood, in my head, is organized by grade, since I can tell what grade I was in based on which teachers I had and I felt that was a much better way to track stages of my childhood rather than tracking my age, which wasn’t terribly easy to track since I felt about the same at all ages. If I ever wanted to try and compile a proper timeline for all of the random moments I recall acros my early years, it would lead to me staring down a very messy sheet of paper, trying to place what year I was in second grade, or in fifth grade, or how old I was at the time.

This came up because one of my friends and I was trying to explain the plot of a specific game to another friend of mine, but all the different stages kept on getting mixed up in my head while my other friend seemed to have a more clear understanding of the timeline than me, and it made me realize that most people don’t really struggle to organize their facts the way I do.