If I’m This Nostalgic in My Early Twenties, Then What Am I Gonna Do at 70?
By Stella Speridon-Violet
The other day I found myself driving past my childhood home. I say this like it was an accident, but I made a perfect right turn down a street 30 minutes away when I had told my mom I was only going down the street to get laundry detergent.
In my subconscious, I knew where I wanted to go the second I got in my car, a place that hasn’t been my home since I was ten. The funny thing is, the drive is ingrained in my mind, but the last time I lived there, I could barely grasp the concept of fourth-grade math.
I’m not sure why I do that to myself, wanting to relive a life I will never be able to get back. I think I missed a version of my dad that day, the one I briefly knew when I was six, but even then, that memory was not a true reflection of who he really was at the time.
As I get older, I feel sorry for my childhood self, a girl who saw the kindness in everyone and could light up a room for everyone else but herself.
When I was a kid, I’d tend to be quiet when I was alone; I still do. And when I start a new job, I feel like the same awkward pre-teen who struggled to make friends, even though I’m fairly extroverted when I have a few drinks in me.
At sixteen, I was miserable and thought that was the way I’d always be. I wanted to grow up so fast that I ended up losing a lot of the traits and qualities I’d admired in myself when I was younger.
That kind of nostalgia kind of just makes me angry for not allowing myself to be a teenager. But then again, I’m glad I fucked up and made a lot of mistakes because now I have the space to grow from it and re-learn all of the things I loved when I was younger.
After I drove past my house, I went to the McDonald’s I would go to as a child to get an ice cream cone and sat in the parking lot where one of my now best friends grew up too. I smiled because we did not meet until much later in life but grew up eerily close to each other.
I thought of my first crush, whose house was down the block. I would go with my dad to feed his family’s horses, not knowing that only a few years later I’d set foot in the same house and greet the same animals and experience a first glimpse of what I considered love at the time.
I think it’s good to explore the past and see how far you’ve grown, and I know someday I will look back on the life I’m currently living and desperately wish, for a moment, to be sitting in my studio apartment at 22.
We are constantly reminded that life moves fast and there’s nothing we can do to slow down time. It’s the one thing out of anyone’s control, and I used to find that irritating, but now I find it beautiful. It’s truly one of the only things we all have in common.
There is no money in the world that can stop time and no medicine that can take us back to the place we used to call home.
I struggle with getting stuck in the past because it’s a place I go to when I write. I think of small moments either from childhood, last year, or yesterday. I relive them in my writings and try to document as much as possible, but reliving moments can be fairly exhausting and take me to places I hadn’t thought about in ages.
But maybe nostalgia isn’t something we are supposed to outgrow or ignore; perhaps it's something we’ll deal with for the rest of our lives.
Sometimes I think looking back means I can’t ultimately move forward, but I don’t think I believe that anymore. I can miss my childhood home without wanting to live there the same way, and I can miss being thirteen without wanting to be thirteen again. I can be grateful for who I am now while still mourning the girl I used to be.
Arguably, growing up is realizing you’re going to lose every version of yourself eventually.
Every time I wake up, I become someone slightly different, and there’s something slightly terrible, yet beautiful, about that. Which makes me wonder, if I’m already this nostalgic at 22, what the hell am I going to do at 70?
Maybe I’ll drive past this apartment and remember the spiral staircase that everyone was afraid of. Or, I’ll hear a song and remember a summer I thought would last forever. Maybe I’ll miss the friends I haven’t even met yet, the places I haven’t lived, and the versions of myself I haven’t become.
Maybe I’ll look back at this exact moment and wish I could tell myself to stop worrying so much about how quickly it’s going, because someday, I’m going to miss being 22.
I perhaps think the best thing I can do for that future version of myself is actually be here for it, instead of romanticizing every memory before it’s even over. To not spend so much time wondering if I’ll miss today that I forget to live it.
To just be 22, because, apparently, I’m going to miss it.
