Viktória Botka
I have this bad habit, where I could seem not to be living in the present. I daydream a lot. Eyes glazed staring straight into nothingness, unengaged in the present, just thinking about the good ol’ days, about how much better everything was back then. How magical my childhood was, how easy and fun elementary school was, and even just how much better life was a few years ago. I don’t enjoy living in the present, I guess. Or I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with how good or unhappy I feel in the present. Maybe memories just shine brighter than the things happening right now. Old but gold?
It’s weird, and I expect many others experience this too. Where you just look back to the days when you were younger, not necessarily childhood, just a few years prior to where you are now. Looking back, remembering, romanticizing everything. I read a quote that says “Nostalgia is basically just memories with the trauma edited out.” Nostalgia filters memories, leaving only the pleasant parts and removing the negative experiences, trauma, or pain that were part of them. It’s easy to construct the belief that the past was so much more enjoyable and beautiful compared to the present, which is just silly, because in the past we were probably also complaining and struggling. We were probably going through some hard stuff too, but also comparing that reality to the ones before it, idealizing them (nostalgia).
The way you deal with nostalgia matters. It can either get the better of you, by making your life feel like it’s always getting worse than before and going down an anticlimax, compared to the “magical good old days.” Or, you can use it as a hope, something to help you get past those horrid days when you are devastated, to give you hope that one day, these days, this era of your life will be one you’ll think back on and miss, that those things that made it hard to get from one day to another, those were (hopefully) not so deep to keep in your memory forever. And even if it was a very tragic or hard period of your life, maybe it will be a good one to tell people about, or simply remember quietly during another hard stage: that you have been there before, and you’ll survive once more. It’s essential to live in the present, even when it’s hard, slow, hopeless, full of misery, whatever; because you must know that there is hope, that perhaps one day, it will be pleasing to remember those things, to talk about them today.