"The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is." -Vladimir Nabokov
About once a year, I'll come across a memory, or something that I loved and cherish as a child. Whether this is a photograph of me as a young child, or a television show I used to watch religiously as a 10 year old, the reaction I get from it puts me into a very...challenging headspace.
In my experience, the issue with nostalgia is that it forces us to believe that times were so much better, so much easier, years ago than what they are now. We feel that the happiness we had so long ago is now unattainable because things have changed so much. We get so wrapped up in a past world that may have been completely different from how we are remembering it. The thing about nostalgia is that it only allows us to remember the good times we experienced because typically, difficult times are something we don't look back on in fondness.
My senior year of high school was a difficult year for me. With a clear head, I can look back on it and understand that while there were fun memories intertwined throughout the year, there were also really bad experiences that I would never want to relive. Even though I know this as the truth, there will be days were nostalgia makes me believe that that year was one of the best years of my life, and I feel like I would absolutely anything to go back. Why does this happen? Because my brain has cherry-picked amazing memories to focus on, which clouds up the bad experiences. Sometimes even the memories I think about as being so wonderful and great, weren't all that terrific in reality.
When we go through difficult times, nostalgia should be a way for us to open up a book of memories, reminisce, and then shut the book and move on. Instead, we cling on to the pages, and keep them open while we go through the present times. We compare these manipulated memories to our current lives, and not surprisingly, we conclude that our current lives will never be able to compare to the altered past our mind has created.
While nostalgia can be a great thing, it can also be very dangerous. We have to remember that nostalgic memories are usually fabricated and changed in more ways than one. We may never be able to relive memories that are close to our heart, but we can always create new ones, and that should fuel us to close the book of the past, and keep moving forward.
If "The Great Gatsby" has taught us anything, it's that you can't relive the past.