The Trouble with Nostalgia

Getting Lost Down a Memory Lane I Didn’t Ask For and Don’t Know How to Escape

The thing about nostalgia is that it leaves you feeling hollow.

You think back on those days with that sepia toned fondness that seems to cover up all the broken parts. Somehow you feel like things were simpler, gentler, and always more fun. Somehow you gloss over all the pieces that tore you to shreds, and the faces tied to those memories seem kinder than they ever did in the moment.

Nostalgia is actually a fascinating phenomenon. “A sentimental or wistful longing for the past.” It’s meant to be attached to happy memories but it does have a way of twisting memories into happy ones.

So much of my life I’ve lived in the past.

Remembering these little moments that have brought me to where I am today, and I’m getting caught in the cracks in between. It’s not the trauma that makes me want to go back, it’s the moment of tenderness in the middle of it. The moments of feeling like I could take on the damn world, like I was loved and cared for, like someone saw me. In my remembering, those moments come flooding in with a violence that’s almost too much to bear, but it feels so good to remember. I know those memories are twisted, I know the kindness was a hollow version of itself, but damn… to feel seen in that way.

Most of my youth I spent with older kids. I’m not entirely sure why, but aside from a brief stint in middle school, I seemed to have a hard time making friends with kids my own age. The older kids though, they seemed to accept me. To welcome me into the fold. My angry and broken self clung to their approval. To be seen and acknowledged by the older kids as someone who wasn’t accepted in most places felt … wonderful.

It didn’t really matter that I was often just a tagalong, someone to fill out the crowd. I was there. I was part of something.

Never mind that most of that something was shit I had no business being part of in the first place. Never mind that most of that time I was made to feel small for my younger age, somehow being seen in that smallness still meant more than not being seen at all. And I truly felt those were my only options.

I got myself caught up in a lot of messes.

A lot of experiences that a child my age should never have had, a lot of things I had to navigate myself while pretending that nothing was wrong and that I knew exactly what was going on. I didn’t. I let things happen to me that I never should have let happen, and I took the blame for those things as well. I found myself drowning in a sea of broken older boys that didn’t or couldn’t know how to love but felt they had the right to say what love is. To “teach me something.” I mean, they were older, more experienced, right? Who better to learn from?

Anyone. Anyone else would have been better to learn from.

And yet… those in between moments of softness cracked me wide open. To look into the eyes of someone who everyone around you has proclaimed to be “the one,” and have them see you… alone from everyone else. Separate and different from everyone else. It’s pretty fucking convincing. No… it’s debilitating. Haunting. And it stays with you.

But it’s not just those moments.

It’s the moments of being brought to places you could only go because of the people you were with. To have been “in’ the group — regardless of who was there, who approved… someone approved of you. That’s all that mattered. Someone approved of you.

Nostalgia never leaves me feeling whole. It never fills me up. It leaves me with an ache in my chest and tears in my eyes for what could’ve been, even if it’s not true. It leaves me feeling used up, dried out, emptied, drained. These moments try to convince me that it wasn’t so bad… at least it wasn’t all bad, but if it wasn’t — wouldn’t this be more pleasant?

Sometimes I wonder what nostalgia feels like for others. What memories come pouring in and how it leaves them at the end of the day. Is it soft and warm? Does it feel like sunny skies and the freedom of running barefoot through the streets? Does it feel like backroads drives at night or side street walks through the day? Like the perfect song coming on at just the right moment? Does it have an acid glow? That one that leaves everything twinkling a little brighter, a little more like water reflecting the sunlight?

I don’t know. I can’t live inside another’s mind. As hard as I’ve tried — I can’t live someone else’s memory.

I do know that nostalgia plays tricks.

It’s just her nature, it’s not her fault that our brains do this. It’s not as if she is trying to force us into rose-colored glasses for all the things in our past we like to remember. But people get stuck in it. Why else do you think your high school quarterback still plays on a local football league? Why else do you think people get so strange about reunions? Have you not noticed how we all tend to get lost in reminiscing? How our eyes fade into the distance and we’re no longer talking to each other but lost in memory, needing someone else to have been there with us?

How does it feel to come home and face that? I wouldn’t know. I avoid my hometown like the plague that it was on my life. But some have fonder thoughts of home. Some … even if they move away, don’t ever really leave. It’s something in the memory. The sights, the sounds, the smells. Something that can trigger a moment of nostalgia so quickly — it’s like heroin. A quick hit that floods your senses with a strange but ultimate euphoria, and leaves you cold and shivering and sick all the same.

That’s what it is… I’ve been trying to put my finger on it, and that’s the pulse. Nostalgia might as well be a drug. For some it’s so addictive they never get away from it. Other’s refuse to touch it. At least… that’s how it seems to me.

Knowing this, I should probably keep away from the stuff. But she has a way of creeping in at the most unexpected and often inconvenient times, dragging you through the day with her. I feel both love and hate for her, but at the end of the day, I know she’s always going to be there.

Waiting.

Maybe this is just another way my brain is trying to protect me. Maybe, for those of us who sink into nostalgia like a warm bed we never want to leave, it’s the only way to handle the things we’d much rather forget. It’s hell, but a soft one. I’m sure there are studies about this. Some other, more clinical way to explain this… but it doesn’t really interest me at the moment. I just want to get out.

I just want to feel whole again.