Currently, my two eras are Before Sentience and After Sentience. The switchoff occurred in about eigth grade; that was when I finally, truthfully became aware of the actual process of thought and its relation to the things I was doing for which people were calling me “smart”. It didn’t take me long, with the help of my best friend (whom I met around this time, not-so-coincidentally), to start applying this to an analysis of myself, my thought processes and patterns, and their relations to who I was and what I did. Soon thereafter, I stopped being an idiot (despite what my grades, various tests, and my parents and teachers said, I was a complete and utter moron as a kid; I was just a moron with good fact retention and base-level processing skills).
Recently, through application of what I’ve learned about myself to what I’ve noticed about others, I’ve been learning to present myself to people more as a nice, open-minded, caring individual, and less as “creepy psycho dude”, the latter being the vibe I apparently used to give off in spades (and still do, if I don’t provide conscious effort to the contrary). I’ve also gained a far greater understanding of what exactly the human mind is, the processes by which consciousness and its various divisions handle that which we call “thought”, and the ability (and awareness) to consider how each individual element of the innumerable interactions we observe and take part in daily affects the system as a whole.
This is in stark contrast to pre-sentience, in which I did schoolwork, read Calvin & Hobbes books to the point where I memorized every strip, and never really stopped to wonder for even a moment why it was that everyone else seemed to hate me. (Now, of course, I understand perfectly well why some people still hate me…well enough, in fact, to realize that I really ought not care.) Better to spend my time trying to impress my mom by using some more big words, or watching the Ninja Turtles. Yeah. Turtle Power. Roundabouts the end of sixth grade, a spark of awareness did briefly illuminate previously-unseen regions of my mental capacity, but all that served to do was cause me to think (realize?) that most of the people around me were idiots, resulting in a two-year period in which I proclaimed everything to be stupid and became actively, rather than passively, antisocial. Intelligence-wise, not much of an improvement.
So, there you have it. I’m sure that, as my life progresses, there will be some other defining moment that shapes my existence to the point of creating a new dichotomy of lifestyle. For now, though, that’s what I’ve got.