Ah, the good ol’ days. Selective memories of a better, vanished time.

Nostalgia. I’ve engaged in quite a bit of it here on this blog. And to be honest, I find it as comforting as it is crippling. If you’re a long-time reader of the blog I’m sure you’ve read something about my “nostalgia spirals” on here – they’ve grown far less frequent as those memories and feelings become more distant and I actively try to focus on being present in my life as it is happening, but in a lot of ways I kind of miss them.

I used to be very good at imagining myself in my past. When you couple that with my just-barely-asleep “dreams” (thank you, long-time sleep disorders) and my ability to influence the things that are happening, almost to the point of lucid dreaming, my brain can almost feel like a time machine. Of course, the bad side of it is when I get into nostalgia spirals and they cause insomnia because I just can’t STOP thinking about how it felt to walk from my dorm to the dining hall at my college on a Sunday afternoon (when it always seemed to be windy for some reason…) Or I can’t stop thinking about jogging down the carpeted hall in my dorm my freshman year and basically jumping down the two flights of stairs to the first floor. Or how it felt to crunch my bare feet into the Berber carpeting in the first house my daughter came home to when she was a baby.

All these sense memories are powerful for me, and they’re like a sensory rolodex that I can flip around and find something to make me feel safe and happy, strolling around in my past.

The beautiful part of this is as the situational memories sort of mush up and fade a bit, the sensory ones seem to be pretty solid so long as I remember the triggers.

Tying this back into nostalgia, the reason nostalgia has always had such a grip on me might be how I grew up. Trying to make sense of a life between the ages of 5 and 18 where we moved every two years (on average), it was hewn into the fabric of my very existence to cling to the familiar, because so much of life was unfamiliar on a regular basis.

I think I rolled with it well, and I had my little brothers and my parents as “fellow travelers” on the journey, but I don’t know that I ever shook nostalgia-as-coping-mechanism. My spirals grow strongest during my darkest depressions, desperately searching through my history for a time when I didn’t feel so detached and sad.

I usually find some memory and then I’ll try and ignore all the questionable parts of how I actually was at that time and focus on the things I did. Ironically, many of the ones I latch onto actually come from times in my life when I was powerfully depressed. There were many times when I wasn’t mentally all that fit when life was actually being rather kind to me – I just couldn’t shake my caustic brain and the terrible way it treated me. So I wander into those periods I think both because there are cool things happening but also because I know I’m in a similar mental state.

Which brings me to that which 2020 hath wrought. I’ve had a couple of pretty solid dips in the past year – sadly I’m going through one right now even though things seem to be looking up – and the times I was depressed I managed to use old fond memories and being present in my life at the same time to mitigate the pain. It’s actually nice having a little one around – the world is so new. If you imagine how they must see the world – all the possibilities and things to learn – it can really be a welcome distraction from that asshole in your head telling you you’re a piece of shit and a horrible husband and father and brother and son and friend, and terrible at your job, a shitty musician, etc. etc.

And so the toddler definitely helps, as does clinging to pleasurable memories, but my biggest issue is that if I linger too long thinking about the past, it gets infected with the bad talk of the present. I beat myself up in three ways, longing for a past that can’t be lived again, sad that it wasn’t appreciated when it was my life, and then guilty for wanting life to be something other than the blessed thing it is now.

And that’s the thing: I am truly thankful for the life I have. It’s pretty great. I don’t know that I’d want to relive other parts of my life knowing what I knew then. It’d be fun to tackle them knowing what I know now…that might be rather exhilarating. Dammit. I need an “Environmental Simulator” like on The Orville – or something like that, where I can revisit those situations completely. Or maybe not. Maybe that’d just be another spiral. Much like this. Or this. Damn if I don’t repeat myself sometimes. Anyway…

Back to the topic. Nostalgia. I love it, it’s helpful. But it’s also a prison. So I have to be careful. I’m interested in reading your takes on nostalgia and how it affects you – hit me with a comment if you like. I’d love to get some more perspectives.

Thanks for reading!
TMS

P.S. I get my first dose of the vaccine on Saturday. (yay obesity!) Next week’s post might be about that experience.

P.P.S. All the usual stuff – Black Lives Matter, wear a mask, physically distance, socialize digitally, wash your hands, care about facts…and a few new things: put country over party, call out bigots of every type, don’t mourn garbage that cancer takes out for us (not all of the dead deserve our respect, especially when they were horrid, cruel bullies who always talked ill of the dead and essentially ruined our discourse, radicalizing a large segment of our country and tearing it apart for their own financial gain), and believe in the common good and take care of people instead of being a selfish pile of shit.