For the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind

I seem always to be followed by this emotional fatigue, a constant dull throbbing in the back of my head, and an ache in my chest, and I can only attribute this pain to the rose-colored glasses I can not pry away from my face. I live in an uninterrupted state of nostalgia, yearning for the past, and instead of taking trips down memory lane, I have bought a house there, planted roots in the front yard, and furnished every room. I don’t believe that I am the only one who has fallen victim to this perpetual nostalgia. In fact, I think that in my generation, more often than not, most people exist in this specific plane of nostalgia, craving the in-between moments of life, the morning coffees and the afternoon walks we take every day. Why do we do this?

We are constantly documenting our lives. What is the last picture in your camera roll? Is it a random screenshot of a text? Is it your lunch from yesterday? Is it your cat sitting in a funny position? We used to only capture the more grand moments of life, like birthdays, graduations, weddings, etc., but now we are capturing every minuscule moment of life. And every time we look back on these photos, we are hit with little bits of micro nostalgia. It may not even feel recognizable, but it’s there. Suddenly, we are yearning for the scrambled eggs from breakfast last week or the comfort of that hoodie in the random selfie you took in bed this past weekend. All we are doing, constantly, is reliving moments in our lives without the negative emotions we may have felt in the moment. 

Like anything, nostalgia can be both healthy and unhealthy. If you understand the root of nostalgia, what and why you are nostalgic, it can be a warm, bittersweet feeling that doesn’t linger. If it helps you recognize what is finite, and instead of dwelling on the past, you are able to have gratitude for what has passed, it can be healthy. It can help you come to terms with the anxiety you felt in a past moment by giving you peace with the understanding that things will turn out okay, and then it can benefit you greatly. Getting nostalgic pretty often isn’t inherently bad. The human experience is feeling, and that means feeling both happy and sad emotions. But the trick is the balance of how often we are feeling both emotions, and the degree to which we are feeling things. If you are constantly entrenched in the feeling of what could have been, you are missing out on what is right in front of you. 

We are getting to an age where living 20+ years means that a day’s context relative to the totality of our existence is so much less significant than it used to be. However, now that we are hyper-aware and more hyper-sensitive to every detail of every single day of our lives, it’s as if we are constantly living in our memories instead of living in the present. And that mindset makes sense when you put things into perspective. If nostalgia is the remembrance of experiences and memories without anxiety, then you are only recalling a positive livelihood. For example, if your anxiety stems from the fact that you can’t control the future, and you’re worried that things will not work out the way you want them to, then reverting to a mindset where everything is picture-perfect can help you cope with that negative feeling. When you’re living in a constant state of nostalgia, whether on a big scale or a micro one, your consciousness is living in a past reality where everything is comfortable because your future self (aka your present self) is living in a current reality where things really did turn out okay. 

I write in my journal every day. At first, it was a practice of a habit to cope with my emotions, to process experiences, and a place to pour out my thoughts. But now, it has become this incessant need to document my everyday life. I write about my daily schedule, the work I do, the food I eat, how much I have read in one day. I didn’t realize it until as of late, but I think my urgency to fill these blank pages every day is so that one day, when I wake up at the end of my life, I will have the ability to remember everything I have lived through. But is all of this nonsense in my diary the memories I want to look back on fondly? Sitting at my desk in my bedroom at 24, slaving away at my corporate job for weeks on end? Do I want to look back on the same run I did every day, along the same route, that took me the same amount of time? I write so I won’t ever forget, but by doing so, I am hoarding memories that do not hold the weight of the bigger moments in life. 

The price of lived experiences is the likelihood of forgetting that memory later on in your life, and that’s okay. There isn’t anything wrong with trying to capture the little moments in life, but only if these documentations allow you to express gratitude, not hole up in the past. And at the same time, this perpetual nostalgia is not something we have fallen victim to by our own hands. What is our world if Big Money were not capitalizing on our every emotion? Every industry is bombarding us with nostalgia to sell its products. Marketing campaigns are reintegrating historical ads with the current ones, and companies hire iconic figures from our childhood to spark emotional connections; it’s everywhere you look. In this day in age, nostalgia is inescapable. 

Despite all this, I know it will be difficult for me to separate my nostalgia from my present lived experiences. Most of the time, I’m not sure if I even want to remove myself from the addictive feeling of nostalgia. But it’s important to remember that subtext often gets lost in the retelling of history. I can remember my childhood fondly, reminiscing about that one field trip I took in elementary school, and think that life was all sunshine and rainbows, but in reality, what I’m forgetting is that this same field trip took place in 2008, and the struggle that most American families were going through was also affecting my parents. I know I will never be able to stop myself from yearning about what has happened and what could have been, but what really matters is the now, and what will be.