#though college does still impose a degree of “grade”-based indexing a la freshman/sophomore/junior/senior

[in-mutual-weirdness]

Sample size may be busted but like. While I have some time-fuzziness around when some events happened in my life (ex: no idea when I started playing tennis/doing ballet as extracurriculars, and there are some floating events in elementary school I have no time referent for aside from "during elementary school"), I have pretty solid association between what memories in my life happened at what age. Time & age accuracy get better from 6th grade onward - some of my timeline is possible moreso through knowing the order of events for the earlier shit. The more I can tie a memory to a specific place or person, the better age resolution I can get (i.e. books read at a specific grade/from a specific classroom, interactions with a specific teacher).

More generally, my memories appear to be binned as preschool, early elementary (K-2nd), late elementary (3rd-5th), early middle school (6th), late middle school (7th-8th), and then year by year resolution for everything afterward. For ages, that's (3-4yo), (5-7yo), (8-10yo), (11yo), (12-13yo), and then annually after that.

my youth is too much of a blur for me to be able to meaningfully differentiate the ages i was, like 6 or 8 or 10 or 12 are all basically the same collection of fragments. i can only surmise the ages i was for my traumatic memories through logical deduction