I like the smell of car oil. It makes me feel alive. I also like the smell of freshly cut wood. And also the autumn and the smell of apples and burned leaves - then I feel I belong.

And I like the sound of thunders. Thunderstorms make me feel like nothing out there exists or matters, like all the worries just dissolve, temporarily cease to exist. Thunderstorms make me feel safe.

My mum said recently that when I have just learned to walk I would be very scared of thunders and when there was a storm approaching I would jump into her arms, no matter which time of the day it was, even if I would have to climb into my parents bed that I would normally not be allowed to. And she would hold me until the storm is over.

See the connection?


Car oil and wood - also simple, these were the only times when my father would try to bond with me. He was doing his hobbies and was eager to show and explain what he's doing.

Autumn and burned leaves - my mom would finally stop nagging once we started helping with collecting the leaves, and apples were one of the few things that we would agree on us eating in abundance. One of rare conflict free moments and her letting us play. She used to speak about her childhood memories of playing in the leaves too.

When I feel lonely to the core, with no one and nowhere to go, I connect this feeling with the smell of disinfecting liquid. I thought it was because of some mental abstract association of loneliness and death with the disinfecting liquid killing bacteria - until I remembered how my mum recently told me that at the age of 8 months I was taken away to a hospital and had to stay there alone for a couple of days.

The first years of life have such an enormous influence on who we are, whether we're aware of it or not. It's not about what we remember, it's how we grew. Those things grew into us. When I recall a childhood memory I no longer look for a "memory" about what someone said and how I felt. Small children are unable to register memories. I look into how I feel now, into how my thoughts work, how my brain is built, how it has just reacted to the situation, and sometimes I try to connect the dots backwards. And when I succeed I realise that every current characteristic of me is an internalised event from the past. The information about your childhood lies not in the data of the system but in its architecture. And what implies from it - how you are today holds all the information about your childhood, even if your memory didn't register any of it.

Maybe the way each of us sees the world is merely an interplay of those initial childhood experiences. These are the bricks we build our worlds with. We can build whatever we want, but we start with a pre-defined set of bricks, passed down from our caregivers. I think it's important to start realising that there are other bricks out there, as only then we can go looking for other sizes and shapes. More often than not it's impossible to build a happy life using just the initial set of bricks. Trying to do so only brings the well known frustration.