The Power of Nostalgia
I’m a sentimental person by nature.
I collect memories like trinkets and I place them on my bookshelf revisiting them whenever I need an escape. I live within them and them with me. I keep faded ticket stubs and receipts in journals in hopes that one day I can flip to a page and have a memory will resurface. If you tell me your favorite song and months later it comes up on the radio, I will instantly think of you.
Whenever I feel nostalgic, I will pull out memories and immerse myself in it. There is this one particular memory I turn to whenever I’m feeling sad.
It goes like this:
My friend is sprawled across the grass and I’m sitting down next to him. We’re probably 12 or 13, basking in the hot Arizona sun on the school lawn, waiting for our parents to pick us up. I can hear us laughing and for one moment the light catches his sunglasses in the right light and it gives off this bright sparkle. Here, it feels like this is all there is.
Whenever I conjure up this memory I feel both profound sadness and comfort at the same time — bittersweet nostalgia.
Sometimes I find myself living this — haunting memories I’ve engraved into my brain, not leaving until I discover some kind of warmth within them. Sometimes, I find, I live more as a ghost than I do my own body. I wait inside memories and places I wish I could relive again only to come back down to reality once the nostalgia has faded.
Someday’s the feeling never fades and I kill myself over it — the feeling of living in the past, using the memories that I love as a way to breathe. When will I stop killing myself? I have no idea because nostalgia is such a powerful thing.
There is nothing in particular that can call you back to a memory. Nothing you can pinpoint the feeling to. It can be sunglasses reflected in sunlight or it can be a particular walk where the sky looks like something out of a dystopian movie. Nostalgia can be this small picture of your life, like the memory of an overwhelming kind of love or a moment so different from how your life is now.
Most days I can go on with my life and not think about a memory I left behind a long time ago. Yet some days, it’s all I can do. My brain doesn’t let it go and I’m left with this indescribable feeling of nostalgia for a time that wasn’t even happy or sad, rather, just there.
How do we manage to let go of all the things that shaped us into who we are? Always wanting to push against the tide of time? Yearning for a time that wasn’t now?
Nostalgia reminds me of phantom pains, a common painful sensation amputees experience for limbs that are no longer there. A sensation so powerful and real that’s believed to be caused by severed nerve endings finding discomfort and trying to make sense of something no longer there.
Because that’s the base of all nostalgia: Learning to let go of something that is no longer there.
Which, as I prefaced before, as a sentimental person I find myself grappling at memories and reliving them more often than I care to admit. Some days these bittersweet nothings of long-gone memories place shackles around my ankles and won’t let me move on.
So, how do you manage to live moments instead of reliving them? Especially when those memories comfort you?
Through time I’ve found that in order to no longer miss what you can’t have, you’ll have to love harder in order to forget.
To me, this means loving and enjoying every second that comes my way.
For a long time I would think about how in a month, two years, or even a decade, the moment I was currently in would make me nostalgic. I would be with someone living and I would already be making space in my mind for the days I would want to relive it soon. I would forget the feeling of it before it even happened.
It was challenging not to think about how in time I would forget. How one day I would have to let it go. How one day, I would film moments in my eyes only to be replayed when nostalgia became a friend instead of an enemy.
I’m not saying you can’t be nostalgic for your younger self. The days when The 1975 was blasting through your headphones and you were romanticizing every second of your 14-year-old life. There is something special about those perfect moments you become nostalgic for. But don’t let yourself stay in them, remember that the good days are in front of us.
(What does nostalgia mean to you? Is it sunglasses reflecting in the sunlight? Your mother’s hand gripping your arm on park walks? That perfect hug from the one you love? Let me know on Instagram! @garciugh)
Sources:
Kaur, A., & Guan, Y. (2018, December 4). Phantom limb pain: A literature review. Retrieved September, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/