Everything You Thought Was True is Wrong.

I was all geared up to do a little October music post today, but either WordPress or YouTube or some combination of the two is being very touchy right now, so I guess I won’t be going that direction after all. So I thought, what about that moment that I’m sure everyone has, when they somehow wander into a darkened living room to catch a terrifying scene on the TV as their parents are watching a scary movie and you’re probably supposed to be upstairs sleeping. I’m sure several of us have had an experience like that. I know I have. I have this vivid memory of turning the corner into the living room just in time to see Pennywise the Clown crawl out of a sewer drain, scaring me absolutely shitless and completely ruining clowns for me for just about ever.

Or did I? It’s funny. I started researching a little for the post, and discovered that It originally aired in 1990, which, if my parents were watching it on TV, would have put me at about age 5 or 6. So that makes sense, that I would be frightened about such a thing at that age. However, I’m pretty sure it was a VHS, so I was likely a little older, say seven or eight. Which seems to be in the less impressionable age, but I was also a pretty sensitive kid. But here’s a third thing. I could have sworn it was in our second house, which I’m pretty sure we didn’t move into until around when my dad got remarried, and he got remarried when I was eleven. But at age eleven, I definitely wasn’t that impressionable, because I’m pretty sure it was around that time that I was playing games like Phantasmagoria.

So what gives? Up until this evening, I would have sworn left and right that this even happened when I was still fairly young and it was scary as hell. But it doesn’t match with the location that the memories happens in. Is my memory recalling it correctly? Was I really much older than I thought and Pennywise is just that freaking scary so that even an eleven year old would be freaked out if she wandered upon him unexpectedly? I’d like to think so…after all, that was around the age of the kids when it all happened, isn’t it?

It’s so strange to be completely sold on a memory and then have the rug pulled out from under your feet like that. I definitely avoided watching It for the longest time, too, though I finally saw it last year, and the book is on my pile of To Be Read books. Have you ever had a memory that you discovered was not exactly the same as you remembered it? How about a moment of catching a bit of a scary movie and it traumatizing you for quite a while?