2 y/o: mom and I were in a department store. I went into the fitting room, and decided to sing/dance in front of the mirror as if performing onstage. saleslady heard this and, delighted, beckoned the others over to stand outside and listen: "girls, girls, there's a concert!"

3 y/o: we just immigrated from the (former) USSR to the US. this experience intensely stressed me out. mom and I were outside one day when I saw a plane flying overhead. I pointed at it and asked, "mom can we get on that plane and go home?"

3 y/o: I was playing with some building toy blocks, kind of like Lincoln Logs. I built a tall structure out of them, then when it fell over and the blocks scattered everywhere, I asked my mom, "if our building topples just like this one did, can we move back home?"

5 y/o: I was outside my grandparents' apartment building. a girl my age ran over, wanting to play. not knowing much English at this point, I didn't know what to say, so I panicked, told her "wait", and ran inside to my grandparents and stayed there. not sure how long she waited.

6 or 7 y/o: my first and only waking nightmare. I had just read a Toy Story picture book, and Sid's toys ended up giving me a nightmare. I woke up in the middle of the night and ran to my mom crying, but kept hallucinating that they were following me. it was... terrifying.

8 or 9 y/o: we just got a computer, but I only got to use it while my mom was on the phone, & since we had AOL, I couldn't use the internet. so I doodled in Paint, but I hadn't realized I could resize the canvas, so I ended up doodling a *lot* of vertical banners for a *while*.

7 y/o: invited a boy from my class to come over after school to play. he said "no, you have chicken pox". I laughed and hand-waved away the fact that I didn't know what kind of food 'chicken pox' was by confidently saying "no I don't, but we can make some other kind of food!"

8 y/o: friend & I would sit in the stairwell of our apartment building, looking out the window at the windows of the building next door, "spying" on people. we only saw shadows, but we made up wild stories about what was going on & recorded them in a notebook labeled "Top Secret"

8 or 9 y/o: same friend refused to help me figure out how to get the Card Key in Pokemon R/B 😾 took me *forever* to realize that if you step on one of the teleportation squares, you can teleport back and keep walking in the same direction. I thought they were actual barriers

7 y/o: overheard a girl in my class calling *herself* fat, and so I *immediately* tattled on her to the teacher (??????). the girl looked at me like I was an idiot and clarified that she had called herself "phat", not "fat"

5 y/o: my English was slowly getting better. sort of. my teachers gushed / laughed (lovingly) to my mom that when I read passages aloud, my pronunciation was absolutely impeccable, but I practically didn't understand a word of what I was reading.

7 y/o: I'd make up wild stories to tell kids about my great grandma (who I never met). she was a fearless jungle explorer who tamed tigers. she was also an inventor & invented a pencil with "rubber" lead; after writing with it, you could move around the markings with your hands.

8 y/o: class gathered before a field trip to hear the rules, one of which was "no gameboys allowed". not knowing what a gameboy was yet, but needing to *thoroughly* understand the bounds of the rules, I raised my hand and asked "what about gamegirls?"

9 y/o: a group of us were gathered around The Best Artist in our school (who I later quickly caught up to), holding up our drawings for her to judge & comment on. in a bizarre self-deprecating / attention-seeking move, I screamed out "UGLY!" about mine & got in trouble for it.

10 y/o: just discovered IRC & was very new to the internet, so I believed a rando when he told me he knew where I lived & was on his way over. I went & excitedly told my friend & got him to come wait w/ me outside. we waited for quite a bit but, surprise surprise, nobody came.

9 or 10 y/o: my very first time on IRC (Pojo's Anime channel on Mediadriven), I got overwhelmed by the flood of messages and couldn't read fast enough to keep up yet, so I asked everyone "can you all be quiet for a few minutes so I can read all your messages and catch up?"

10 y/o: angrily chased a kid around the classroom, screaming at him, because he spelled "laugh" as "laff". wish I remembered my reasoning here, but mostly I just had anger issues and what I later realized was probably OCPD.

6 y/o: I was a guest on a children's TV talk show kinda thing. we rehearsed beforehand, but it was supposed to look ad-libbed. so, on live TV:

host: "do you know any songs?"
me: "... yes?"
host: "can you sing one for us?"
me: "... but I already did when we rehearsed..."