Coping with Nostalgia, A Beginner's Guide

I thought that the whole idea of nostalgia was a *longing* for the past. I thought only people who had some kind of idealised formative experiences really had any reason to suffer from them.

I dunno; it was a great deal of comfort to me to learn that *most* people had miserable childhoods/adolescences. Or at least, it was very common among my friends. The people I know who had idealised childhoods - they turned out to be the freaks.

In terms of *regret* - thinking of the past with overwhelming feelings of doing things differently. Yeah, I suffer from it. Some days more than others. But it's not nostalgia. You couldn't pay me enough money to do all that again, even if it were possible.

Hah - I can relate so much to that... I'm awfully prone to nostalgia and regret, which as now expanded to periods/places I have never actually experienced (e.g. topanga canyon in the early 70s, eastern europe in the early 90s).
I'm not sure one can call that nostalgia or whethere it's relevant to this thread, but it sure fills me with that sweet familiar melancholy.

xpost Kate

it's a guide for beginners, so should be 'A Beginners' Guide'.

Can I get away with saying it's a guide for just one beginner, then? ;)

well sometimes the distance of time actually puts an idealised gloss on a period that wasn't so great/special in the first place.

Again, perhaps I'm simply using the wrong terminology. Melancholy would be a better way to describe it. But then again, I've never really experienced a longing for the actual past (interestingly, a longing for an imaginary past is something I have to learn to ignore nearly every day).

Consequently, nostalgia = regret = melancholy for me. Or something like that.

multi x-post

Personally I find that nostalgia can be extremely therapeutic. Digging out old records and photos, whilst often sad is often a cathalyst into cheering me up once I've put them away.

Maybe the reason for the regret/melancholy/nostalgia is that I am trying to trace this awkward feeling back to some point, and that formative years seem to be as good a place as any, possibly because they are far enough away to be slightly fuzzy and malleable to what I want to believe, but not far enough to be a complete fantasy.

xpost Ronan

DL: That sounds awesome. And I really like the idea of the catalyst for cheering up. Perhaps the key is to exorcise some of these demons, rather than shutting them away.

Which is odd, as my teenage years were uniformly horrendous...

xpost....

Still, as Signoret had it, "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be."

Good times!

(Then again, my collective nostalgia is for about 1966. Or maybe 1926. Or 1886. Or 1806. I don't know.)

Of course, being 17 was actually pretty shite.

Any Pessoa experts round here?

Like opening a little tiny window into the past, and realising how truly shit things were back then, and realising that no matter how miserable you occasionally feel, your life is a THOUSAND times better than it was when you were a teenager?

How lame am I for nearly getting teary-eyed just reading this?
I get the same sort of thoughts but I wouldn't want to not have them or find some way to stoicly "cope" with them. Bittersweetness is a nice flavor.

About the future I only can reminisce
For what I've had is what I'll never get
And although this may sound strange
My future and my past are presently disarranged
And I'm surfing on a wave of nostalgia for an age yet to come

I look I only see what I don't know
All that was strong invincible is slain
Takes more than sunshine to make everything fine
And I feel like I'm caught in the middle of time
And this constant feeling of nostalgia for an age yet to come

i feel like i've been sneaking back into my teenage life, stealing all the good bits and then running back to now and stashing the loot. probly sticking two fingers up to my old self as i steam away.

I spent last night hanging out with a girl woman who I've known since 1987. In some ways, in 30 seconds, both of us were 17 again, laughing about boys, shagging, drugs, drinking, rock'n'roll - until she started moaning and saying "no more rock'n'roll, please!" And then we realised how much both of us had grown up, how different, how responsible we were. I'm working a proper corporate banking job, she's working a proper rock'n'roll touring job.

And on a spur of the moment impulse, she logged into MySpace, and started showing me the profiles of all these people we'd grown up with - local rock stars and punk boys we idolised when we were kids. And *they* looked middle aged. Fat, bearded, truck drivers with kids and too many tattoos. Guys we would have *died* for when we were 16, the etherial, skinny, elegantly wasted punk boys.

Dare and I were always the outsiders back then, imports into a tiny, closed and closed-minded community in Upstate NY - she grew up in Brooklyn, I grew up in North London - we knew there was more to live than noise shows at the QE2.

What struck me wasn't how they'd aged, these people we used to know - but how their lives had become stuck in ruts. They might have moved to a bigger city for a while, but they moved back. Still living in Albany or Troy or maybe they've moved as far as Buffalo. It wasn't the aging process - neither Dare nor I are skinny kids any more, we've put on weight and a few crows feet. But it's the fact that we got OUT. We moved on. I moved back to London, Dare moved to Detroit and we did things with our lives.

So even when I feel like my life is in a rut, at least it's a rut in London. Instead of the basement of squat in the back end of beyond, we're sitting drinking in the polo lounge of a posh hotel, drinking wine with rock stars, ha ha. And even if that's mean or schadenfreude or whatever, it makes me realised how far I've come - physically and emotionally - in 20 years. And I just want to go HA BLOODY HA to those people who beat me up in high school.

Fuck, I just broke a tsunami-crest of this shit.

thinking abt. two childhood bullies that're now dead

particularly olfactory:

musky-sweet acorn smell of wet october leaves in new england, wet asphalt, acrid tang of slick metal playground bars --

Why were you lick metal bars?

they had a smell

it's hard not to sound like a retard when you're describing smells

Why were you lick metal bars?

-- Ms Misery, Friday, 14 September 2007 19:31 (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

they had a smell

-- remy bean, Friday, 14 September 2007 20:18 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

this is one of the most perfect explanations

the bully, who later became a friend, was named ricky white.

he was a heavy-set irish catholic kid with bristle-broom hair and a passing resemblance to jackie gleason. he was a head taller than me (everyone was) and when we forgot we hated each other we talked about the red sox.

ricky tossed a few punches at me in kindergarten when he found out i was a quaker and wouldn't hit back, but they were half-hearted at best. once a year or so he'd start some shit that ended in little more than elbowing back-and-forth in line. in fifth grade we became friends when we both got invited to the birthday party of a kid we disliked. we bonded over embarrassment at the birthday boy swimming in his birthday suit in the pool, and left on good terms. last day before thanksgiving break in sixth grade we played hooky and smoked a cigar in the woods behind the trappist abbey and swung on a decrepit jungle gym the monks used for exercise.

I hate nostalgia. It makes me lie.

I'd like to set a few things straight.

I do not like Creamola Foam. I do not wish they'd bring it back. I was never really 'into' it in any way.
My mum bought it for me a couple of times, I tried the different flavours. I was very 'meh' when it came to drinking it. I preferred Twist & Squeezes.

And please don't start me on Childrens TV programmes. I'll only lie. I'll say "OHMYGODREMEMBERTHAT? I LOVED THAT!!" But I don't mean it really. I preferred the adverts.

I need to break my habit of sitting steaming drunk with VH1 Classics blaring, slurring "somefin'' inside so strong, I know that I can make it, but you're doin' me wrong so wrong I thought that my pride was gone wo-oh, somefin' inside so stroooong wo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh somefin' inside so strong" Then turning to Mr Pumpkin all snotty and teary to tell him "I fucking love that song" because I don't. and I never did.

Nor do I love Sinitta, Sonia or Mr Mister.

I didn't even think the Goonies was that great.

I'm glad I've got it all off my chest now. I feel cleansed in a way.

I'm off to get changed into my legwarmers and watch Fame now....

haha rumpie otm

omg this is so weird i just looked this up on Search cuz i'm feeling incredibly nostalgic (which isn't at all unusual) - love that it was updated yesterday

I didn't even think the Goonies was that great.

madam you go too far

Lying in bed this AM, I had this memory of standing at the corner of the playground @ junior school, probably about 10 or 11 years old? Middle of the seventies. Me, with a couple of friends, talking about the year 2000, which was unimaginably distant back then. We worked out that we'd all be 35 in the year 2000. Being 35 years old was also unimaginable to us. That got me into thinking about all the shit I could remember from jr school, a surprising amount of stuff, considering it was over thirty years ago. It's such a powerful force, nostalgia, when it grabs you, it's very hard to get it off, and it's so negative too, does it ever make you happy? I sometimes wish I could just forget everything. I got up and started doing stuff in the end, I couldn't stand it anymore. Nostalgia ruined my lie-in.

Nostalgia ruined my lie-in

*steals this for a song title*

Help yourself!

What triggered this bout of nostalgia is a/big, big changes in my life @ the moment, which tends to make you think about the way things used to be, and the way everything changes throughout your life and b/I found myself driving through Boldon, where I used ti live back then, I drove past the old house where we lived and noted a/there was this house owned by the army on our estate, where some officer used to live. Sometimes in the morning we'd see his driver waiting for him outside in a khaki coloured Wolseley 18/85 car. The house was this square redbrick thing in a large garden. At some point in the last 5 years I think, someone has bought it, demolished the house and build a hideous McMansion in its place. b/our old house is almost unrecognisable as whoever lives there has spent shitloads with some upvc co, doors, windows, cladding, arch above the front door, all really really OTT.

I just acted on an urge and cleared my iPod of all its music and started adding loads of stuff I used to listen to circa 2003-2006. I don't know what triggered this, but all of a sudden I'm overcome by implacable nostalgia. I keep thinking about holidays I've had (dating only as far back as last year) and places I've lived and people I've known. I've been itching to go back and read books or watch films I've previously visited.

I think I get this once every six months for about a week, but it's very noticeable when it happens. I wonder what causes this?

For me it's usually when my current life is getting a bit shit/complicated/difficult.

Life isn't shit, but it is even busier than usual right now. Seasons can affect it. I know last time I felt like this was in autumn last year which offset memories of the preceding winter where I'd lost my job and a succession of rubbish things happened, and yet I found reflecting on that time in quite a bittersweet way. Very strange.

How odd, that I didn't suffer nostalgia 10 years ago. And yes, arguably 10 years ago, my life was in a better place than it had been anywhere in the years before.

So why do I suffer from nostalgia so badly *now*?

Is it something that kicks in when life reaches a point of "not getting any better" and just going backwards? Is it triggered by bad or just blah life circumstances, remembering when life was more exciting (even if the exciting was sometimes bad)? Or, in this case, was it triggered by discussing an activity that I actually *miss* (that is, being in bands, and talking about what you look for in band mates, and remembering the days when it was *easy* to join a band just by walking down Ludlow St with a bass case, and having mod boys come running after you, asking "Do you want to join our band? We wear suits!" and that was it, you were in a band) and suddenly the romanticisation of one's own past comes flooding back? Nostalgia for a time and place, when that time and place no longer exists? Nostalgia for who you were at that period of your life, your hope, your *belief* that things were possible?

Some days it's so strong it's impossible to live in the present day. But then again, is the present day just so awful that who would want to live in it anyway, wandering back and forth from one room to another? (I'd go out but my foot injury is still not healed.) Perhaps that's it. Enforced stillness causes the mind to go wandering.

I hated the 90s. I hated New York and living in America. I dreamed, the whole time I was there, of moving back to London and never smelling the 2nd Avenue subway station ever again. So why, when my mind goes drifting back, full of nostalgia, is it those awful years and that awful place I wanted to escape so badly, that I return to?