Joanna | 21 | Chicago | She/Her | INFJ | Slytherin "People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn't stop you from having your own opinion."
― Anne Frank
if you woke up one day and you were suddenly returned to your own childhood with your adult consciousness and wisdom intact and you had to re-live your life over again from the beginning. would that be fucked up or what.
On one hand, sure, it’s a fresh start. You have the chance to make better decisions and to avoid mistakes or prevent tragedies from your first timeline. You could probably get rich with relative ease, or succeed in school where previously you failed.
On the other hand, you’re suddenly more alone in the universe than you’ve ever been before. None of your happy memories are shared by anyone else. Your friends do not even know you exist. All your accomplishments, creations, attachments—gone. You dog hasn’t even been born yet… and might not be, depending on how the world plays out this time around.
Maybe you decide to play it safe and try to re-live your life as closely as possible to how you remember it. Surely now you can appreciate what you took for granted the first time, and enjoy the moments that were over too soon. But your adult mind is fundamentally different—now things that you remembered being magical are mundane, or tainted by an ugly reality. The veil of innocence is drawn back, and your perception of the world is altered. Playing with your childhood best friend is no longer the vibrant game of all-encompassing pretend between equals that comes as naturally to you as breathing… it’s an awkward roleplay between a child and an adult pretending to be a child. You’re self-conscious and alarmed. It feels inappropriate to be privy to the secret world children inhabit and share only with each other.
Maybe you play along as best you can. How well can you act the part? How long until frustration gets the better of you? How long until people begin to notice? Do they sense something “off” about you that sets them on edge, leads them to interpret your behavior as inappropriate or sinister, leads them to mistreat you? Will your parents find themselves unable to love you? Do you make enemies without meaning to? Does your attempt to re-live your remembered original life end up spoiling it horrifically, a corruption that spreads deep into the fibers of your identity?
Or do you try to lean into it—become a child prodigy, wise beyond your years, with an uncanny luck and an amazingly accurate assessment of politics and financial turns? Maybe you become a child celebrity. Maybe you amass a fortune in stocks. But year after year, your life becomes filled with new and unfamiliar challenges. The security of foreknowledge begins to crumble the further you drift from the events and situations of your original timeline. Your astonishing intelligence and gifts begin to flag, you start making mistakes, the security you thought you bought for yourself becomes less secure. The greater your influence on the world, the more it changes from what you remember. Maybe you avoided tragedies from your first life—but now new people may harm you in new and unpredictable ways.
And, of course, maybe you tried to make big changes. Maybe you tried to prevent disasters and save the doomed. Maybe you called in anonymous tips and saved countless lives—and no one will ever know, or learn from it. History takes a sharp turn onto a different path, but now there will be new catastrophes—ones that you can’t guarantee the results of. Maybe the world you left behind was an awful place, but the one you created in its stead could easily be worse, or gone entirely. Maybe you build yourself up into an influential billionaire and STILL find yourself helpless to fix the problems you have always dreamed of fixing, if only you had the material power… but now that you have all that fantasized power, it’s still inadequate, you’re still helpless, the world marches on and continues birthing new heartbreaks… wouldn’t you go mad?
(I’d definitely commit a lot more crimes while I was still small and cute enough to get away with it.)
I love this because when I saw this thought experiment float by without any additions before, I forced my QP into a long debate about it, and here are some of the takeaways from our conversation:
- If you tried to solve all the world’s problems you would indeed go mad, so we decided quickly the healthiest thing would be to focus on trying to solve as many of our own problems as possible, and to appreciate the people we got to see again (and maybe to prevent one or two personal tragedies, like starting to bother a parent about getting regular cancer screenings or giving your grandparent a big hug on what would end up being the last time you’d see him).
- How awful would it be if you got a particular song in your head that hadn’t been written yet and you knew you’d have to wait another 20+ years to hear it again, if it even gets written in this timeline? What if you really really badly want to watch a particular movie but you can’t because it hasn’t been created yet? What about waiting for your favorite books to get written?
- Is your child brain going to be able to hold your adult consciousness? Brains keep growing and developing as we age. Maybe your childhood brain isn’t going to be able to hold onto the things you knew. You’ll only remember them as vague impressions, the way a child listening to adults talking doesn’t really understand what they’re saying and quickly loses interest anyway.
- And is your memory suddenly any better? Let’s say, for sake of argument, you were 30 when you were suddenly thrown back into your childhood (For the sake of numbers, let’s say you were 5 again). After living 10 years in this new childhood, you are 15, but you are now 25 years removed from the last time you experienced being 15. Even if most things didn’t change, how much will you actually remember? Big things maybe but little day to day events from 30 years ago?
- If you could remember things clearly, school again might be kind of fun. For me especially, actually knowing I was asexual would be huge, and I would have a ton more fun not worrying about dating or anything.
- I would appreciate the hell out of my healthy, pain-free back, and do everything I’d learned so far to keep it that way.
- How would you go about re-making the friends you had? I know there are definitely people in my life I would not want to miss out having here. Would you try to let it build organically again or would you go in with the “Listen here’s what happened, you and I were friends in another lifetime, I can prove it” then list all the very personal and private and intimate things they’d revealed to you over the years as evidence of what you’ve said? Would someone be convinced by that or just feel like it was a very unbalanced relationship where one person was claiming a familiarity with the other they didn’t feel? It would be really awkward if someone was treating you like a best friend when you felt like you didn’t know them at all, especially if they knew some incredibly detailed life details about you. I feel like you (the non-time-warped friend) would end up being either freaked out or totally resentful.
- How long would you spend feeling like you were missing something only to realize subconsciously you were still looking for your smartphone?
- How annoying would it be to live through flip phones again while waiting for the smartphones, omg.
- For that matter, how annoying to have to wait for the internet again! Back to encyclopedias…
- Trying to remember not to reference things that don’t exist yet. Like being in high school in the 90s and trying to remember not to say ‘mood’ and ‘yeet’ and ‘samesies.’
- Having to go back to unironically using the slang of your childhood without cringing. “Wassaaap!”
- I would have to re-do a lot of the work I did with my mom on our relationship…that was tough enough the first time around, so I can’t imagine it a second go. Maybe there would be some shortcuts this time but maybe not. Some things you have to do the long way if they’re ever going to stick. My mom and I are good friends now, but it would suck to have to go back to being treated like a kid, by her and by my dad. Not that my dad ever treated me much like a kid, though.
guys. guys I just had a fucking vision of the next tumblr meme
you can do this with basically every cartoon animal and some real animals as well. I’m picturing fucking otters and like. snoopy and shit but garfield was the perfect prototype
[I.D. Two drawings of Garfield. The first is sitting down like a normal cat, as he used to be portrayed in the comics. The second, he is standing on two legs like a human and points to himself with a red glint in his eye. Text above and below reads “Become Bipedal.” End I.D.]
Thanks for the text ID! Anyway I did more of these and you guys can too
it takes place in the Jim Carrey movie universe, so the Grinch has two lesbian moms
(side note, in the movie it was implied the grinch was conceived at a swinger’s holiday party, but we don’t have to talk about that)
tony was a professional athlete who had a lucrative career appearing on cereal boxes
tony the tiger is divorced w/ kids
the Grinch is in therapy
I am sending this to all my friends gaud.
there are over 300 comments on the fic so far, and i’m reading all of them, and i have to say my favorite comments on the ones where people are sharing this with family and friends. sometimes out of spite, sometimes earnestly.
thank you for spreading me around like the invasive fungus i so truly am
I submitted it to my english teacher (our assignment was to find a well written work to share on the internet)
…I am absolutely frothing at the mouth to know your teacher’s response please
this is it
this was beyond my wildest dreams actually much thanks
UPDATE:
i am having the BEST month
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better:
i am now feral. i have gone feral. i am leaning a little pile of stick again a tree, soon i will nap beneath them, they will collapse on me during the next rainstorm
