At.

At four years old my mind was a big blur. Cognitively, I was slow to develop, and I don't think I thought at all until I turned five or six. I do remember daydreaming about cartoon characters. My first clear memory was when I was an infant, and the doctor who was examining me told me not to pee on him; my second — at two or three — was when I pulled a TV over myself, and my father and some other man had to rescue me(the image of them after they got me from under there is burnt into my head); my third — at three or four — was of my father chastising me for wetting myself in a convenience store(got a good smack to the rear for that). We moved houses shortly thereafter(though not, I think, because of that incident).

At twelve I thought myself a philosopher and a writer, and fantasised about becoming immortalised as one of the greats, after stumbling upon the works of such philosophers as Bertrand Russell and being allowed unrestricted access to writing implements. Though my reading ability has been advanced for the past several years if my test scores(which I think attest more to Californian children being generally stupid and aliterate than to my literary prowess) are to be trusted, I read Wuthering Heights in early 2020 and didn't comprehend a line of it. I couldn't yet infer the big picture of a novel from its smaller events and dialogue. At that time I did not realise how immature I was, thinking myself to be on par with an adult, and I thought that prose stylism and Irene Iddesleigh levels of circumlocution, rather than clear communication, made a good writer. I even handwrote in the slanted cursive people from centuries past did, except I grossly exaggerated it; much of my writing from 2020 is illegible to me today.

At almost sixteen, time passes quickly; when I was ten, watching 5 minutes count down seemed like an eternity, now it's a blip. I am more focused on myself and on the real world(nature, politics, history) than on the abstract; the opposite was true when I was twelve. I've begun reading Jane Eyre and realised that there's no way I could've understood this had I read it three or four years ago. I wager that in a few years’ time I'll think the same about my sixteen-year-old self as I do currently about my twelve-year-old self.