Finding Truth: Celebrity Crush Or Nostalgia?
Dealing with confused feelings
Last November, a random online search landed me on a song. I was feeling low at the time, trying to find anything that won’t add to my stress. This used to be one of my passing thoughts: can a crush get confused with nostalgia? My mind has a thing of being broody on its own and I always try to do something to prevent it, like reading a novel or watching anything.
The time, it was a Zulu song: Bongo Maffin Thathi Sgubhu. After the second repeat, I was lost in the song. I found the female lead vocalist, Thandiswa Mazwai’s part most interesting. She was 22 years old when she did that track, and now she’s 46. The song was released when I was 1, I’m 25 now.
Different memories started flooding in. I remember going home from school one afternoon anda car parked next to our building, playing the same song on full blast. It used to be part of the train stations’ playlists on weekends. It even sometimes, found a way of being part of TV ads back then.
Listening to songs way older than me make me long to have existed in those eras. I found out recently that this is close to historical/collective nostalgia: a longing for a time in history that you did not personally experience, according to the American Psychological Association.
I’m still not sure whether I have this; not that it would be a big deal if I did though. I know it makes no sense. If I was to describe what I felt, I would say some feelings of attraction towards the female vocalist. In that moment, I was attracted to her when she was twenty two, not now.
I imagined myself as her boyfriend and the things we could’ve done if only I had existed at the time. My emotions were so strong that I felt the need to go back in time to live what I imagined. This is far from daydreaming. I was allowing what I felt to guide my thinking. Well, attraction doesn’t make sense anyway.
Now, she has completely changed. It’s like seeing some of your old family pictures. You could tell the type of person they were even in their school uniforms. I fear that there could be a possibility that the women I’m attracted to may have been inspired by my mother. I have found myself comparing the women I’ve dated with her. I realised that most of them have my mother’s body type and many of her personality traits.
Again, it is kind of messed up to think this. It doesn’t sit well with me. I am still learning to make a habit of confronting things that make me uncomfortable. I realized that when I do this, truth makes itself obvious.
Back to the celebrity crush. I’ve been working in a retail environment for three years and I’ve met a lot of celebrities. I never had that thing of: “oh my god, you’re [insert celebrity name]. Can I take a picture with you?” type of excitement whenever I see one. Nor did I ever fantasize about dating one. When I got inspired by their work, I would greet them as normal people. Even a few of my colleagues got tired of seeing a lot of celebrities.
After a few months, those emotions faded slowly until they disappeared. I went back to listen to the track hoping they will come back but I didn’t feel the same. I may have confused my love for the song into “creating” feelings of a crush, simply because I was feeling low.
I still enjoy the song though. I guess it gave me some form of therapy. I don’t think it was a celebrity crush; maybe it was the song having nostalgic feelings attached to it.
Nostalgia can be a bad thing, like being a symptom of burnout.
Do you think it was a crush, nostalgia or something else? I like to know how people think. It helps to broaden my perspective on things.
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Copyright © Mbhango Lefoka
