When I was 8 or 9 years old I *think* I wrote on a piece of paper:
(Recreated from memory - the original is lost to a western Sydney classroom, circa 1998).
This piece of paper was found on the floor of the classroom near my desk and handed in to the teacher. The teacher thought it was a very bad thing to make and asked for whoever made it to come forward.
I did not come forward because I was genuinely questioning my own memory. Maybe it wasn't me and my brain was making suggestions at me in the high pressure environment of no one else confessing.
I was not the kind of kid that got in trouble. In fact, I rejected the teacher's premise that this was something anyone should get in trouble for. It wasn't made for bullying purposes, or in any act of rebellion. I don't know what my experience of forms was at that age, but I'm convinced there was some satirical instinct behind it. I loved imitating official documents, like medical pamphlets, menus, and tickets, and this felt like another version of that. I probably couldn't have explained why I thought it was funny, but I had absorbed enough about the cold bureaucracy that forces people into systems, pretends to treat them with importance, demands information from them, then tells them to get lost. I wasn't a fool.
The teacher didn't suspect me. In fact, one of my friends got in trouble. The teacher asked her to stay behind. "Don't you have something to tell me?" she asked, before outright accusing her of being the one who had written the form, I later heard in the playground. My friend denied it of course. The feeling congealed that it must have been me.
I don't think my friend got in serious trouble. The issue went away, though it plagued my conscientious little brain. What troubled me the most was that I couldn't validate for sure if I'd even done it.
A couple of years earlier, I had a dream that contained a memory that when I was two years old I had somehow led the charge of a mob of toddlers and we had attacked another child Lord-of-the-Flies-style and cannibalized them (I think I had seen the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode "Nightmare Cafeteria" at far too young an age). It wasn't quite a recurring nightmare - I wasn't plagued by repeated cannibalism flashbacks - but this "fact" about my past had become part of the lore of my dreamworld every time I dreamed. Being young and unable to fully differentiate between a memory and a memory within a dream, I started experiencing real distress that this was a real thing that had happened. The child I murdered and ate had been a non-existent older sibling of some kids I knew in real life. I even asked my mum if I had done this when I was little. She assured me I hadn't, but I didn't quite believe her. She could have just been hiding my shameful secret. Thankfully, my brain gifted me with the only kind of redemptive closure I could accept: the next time I dreamed, I was able to orchestrate a time travel mission where I could go back and set things right.
Memories and dreams aren't so different. They're both impressions, feelings, stories the brain tells itself. But if you're out there, B, I'm really sorry you got in trouble with the teacher. I think the verdict is in: it was me. I don't remember doing it, but it was clearly my handiwork.
Discuss on Bluesky
— Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) (@hannahshelley.site) August 6, 2026 at 1:19 PM