Remembering us How to Deal With e xc e s s i v e N o s ta l g i a by emily White With shaky fingers, I open the small red notebook that has haunted me since the day I found it in a basement storage bin. I know what’s in there, and I know it’s going to hurt to read it. But without a pause, I open it and let in words my grandmother wrote more than twenty years ago. Her sloppy script comes to life, creating a continuous flow with each turn of the page. My cheeks turn scorching hot, causing droplets to fall from my eyes. And suddenly, I am outside my own body, watching Annamarie Accardi go through life. “I loved to go to Woodstock with my friends, even though we never made it past the parking lot,” the diary reads. She lived a whole life before we knew each other, I realized. We all live whole lives that, even if they are recorded, at some point are gone for good. I find myself dwelling on my past more than I should. I could be listening to a song, scrolling through my camera roll, or finding a stuffed animal I used to cherish. It doesn’t make me happy, but I willingly throw myself into the past to try and feel a few things twice. Maybe you do this too. We all have moments that we wish to forget or that we could relive because they made us so happy. The best we get is a simulation of that feeling. I’ve never truly gotten over the loss of my grandmother. I can still hear 18
The Lexington Line • S/S 22 • vol 8 • no 2
the ambulances scream down my block. The red and blue flashing lights haunt me when I close my eyes, and I am left with nothing but knick-knacks around my house to remember her by. In the 1600s, a physician named Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia.” The British Psychological Society says that he associated the term with anxiety, homesickness, and disordered eating. Keeping objects or images from one’s childhood can make you nostalgic. But there are no rules to this feeling; you can be nostalgic about something that happened only yesterday. This can be extremely harmful to your mental health, as it has been to mine Just like a drug addict chases their first high, I chase and chase the feelings I experienced at different points in my life, knowing it won’t fulfill me. In an episode of the podcast “Speaking of Psychology,” Dr. Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Syracuse University, calls this conflict “bittersweet.” “It’s sweet because we’re remembering the best times, the good times of our life. The bitterness comes from the sense that we know for sure that we can never really regain them, they’re gone forever,” she says.
This longing for the past is nothing new. The ancient Greek poet Sappho shared these ideas in her work in the 6th century BCE. Through her words, she is able to encapsulate the immensity of this feeling. I was so happy Believe me, I prayed that that night might be doubled for us Sappho gives the impression that she is pleading with the addressee or a higher power to go back in time—knowing that cannot happen. By capitalizing the word “Believe,” she tries to convince the audience, and herself, that she was truly happy at that point in her life. This creates the bittersweet feeling Dr. Batcho describes. Our memories are ours after all— and they are not always happy. But even if they are, our memories serve as a reminder that we might never feel those exact emotions again. Though experts today do not consider nostalgia to be a mental illness, it does not always come with a positive connotation. “Longing for the past (something you can’t reclaim) can fuel dissatisfaction with the present,” Crystal Raypole says in a Healthline article. “Nostalgic depression, then, can describe a yearning colored with deeper tones of hopelessness or despair.” *** At ten years old, I lost the love of my life. The moment I lost her, I didn’t realize how much her absence would affect me into my adulthood. The one thing I’m able to fill the void with is objects. Have you ever looked at something that reminds you of someone, and somehow there
