Nostalgia: Looking back at who you were to fuel the furnace of who you are
Your childhood is your own personal mystery — explore it.
I’ve recently written about personal storytelling and ‘going home’ as a way of exploring your relationship with yourself, of where you came from in every sense. This morning, out of nowhere (although woven into everything I am), I wrote this, about looking back in a different way. Looking back into your childhood, at that tough little survivor you once were.
Whose childhood isn’t a mystery to them? How were we formed? How did we get here? Who were we when we don’t remember who we were? Who really remembers being 4? Or 3 or 2 or 1? What have you retained from that early plethora of new lived experience? For there are just as many hours in a day when you’re 1 as 41, so what did you do with them?
Who doesn’t want to go back and sit in the mystery, to look with wonder at the world as we did when we were new? To be closer to your essence, to connect to your own connection to the infinite mystery. To get closer to that unknowable origin of life, your own, at least. Everything from your before-life, that bookend experience which mirrors your other yet-unknowable experience, your after-death.
Your birth was the beginning of a gossamer-thin moment in your atoms’ experience of being you, of having your consciousness along for the ride. That moment — which is your entire life — will be the most profound, personal, intimate existence any one thing can have with itself. Is anything more real to you than your experience of being you?
Your atoms will go on forever after you, never dying, only disseminating, just as they extended in that other direction before you, right back to the origin of it all. But the nowness of you, all of you, from your beginning to your final full stop, you might (vainly) think of it as the main event experience of your atom’s eternity. And so, as the adage goes:
“Your life is an occasion, rise to it.”
However, as we grow into this experience, the reality of it, the mind-shattering brilliance of being an awareness in the universe, somehow, it will dull over time. We will get used to it, it will become humdrum, mundane, quotidian. We will stop waking with wonder and instead will soporifically slip into the just-another-day-ness of living. We will lose connection with what we were at the beginning, the questions we asked. But when we look back, at who we were as a child, then we might just be able to reconnect with the wonder.
You came from somewhere. Your life and consciousness came into this world and that is as divine and sacred and meaningful as any and every other life that has been, is being and will be. But the world and society and its people will wear you down, it will place you in a hierarchical system which will rob you of the wonder, of self-belief. You will get locked into comparison, into competition, into striving. You will forget to wonder.
But your child is waiting in you. Who you were back then. That tenacious little survivor who got you here. They knew something that we’ve forgotten. They weren’t waking up with a to-do list. They were waking up with a “What’s all this then?” fascinated amazement. They emerged into the world rubbing the eternal dream from their sleepy eyes and were ready to experience it all.
My earliest memories are of dreams. I don’t know when they occurred but they were recurring. They could have been in my infant years. Or as a baby. Or in the womb. Or before. I was the largest thing in existence and also the smallest, there was no space outside of myself, no size. In another dream, I was a single beam of infinite brilliant light, on a multi-lane highway of beams of light. Amongst it all there was a single figure, a silver humanoid but devoid of features.
In a later dream I was in a deafening factory, the grey beating pistons of industry all being operated by monkeys. Like the single trajectory of humanity, from the primate to the industrial age. Later still I dreamed of a woman sitting in a dining chair in front of a tv. On the screen was a replica image of a woman sitting in a dining chair watching a tv. On that tv a woman sitting in a chair etc. ad infinitum.
My baby brain was already playing with the mysteries of size and space and sight and sound and time. The questions of a pre-socialised consciousness, before it became regimented by timetables and to-do lists, stultified by social media and celebrity gossip. Your baby/infant/adolescent self had big questions, big wonderings. Can you still find them?
After that, your childhood and teenage years were a no-man’s land, a survival gauntlet. Aren’t you fascinated by how you made it through? I am. For my part, I am utterly fascinated by that kid who escaped his childhood, him who got me here all by himself. Especially when others who were so close to him did not make it, their atoms returned back to the cosmic dance.
Where was his compass? What was his ballast? How did his true north find him? These are my interrogations of the terra incognita of my childhood. It is not easy to access the memories, mostly they come to me when I’m not looking but they definitely prefer the fertile ground of an un-intruded mind. So if my ears are jammed with podcasts 24/7, forget about it. I remember a wild-haired, older American screenwriter guy who once said to me in Cannes, “You gotta be open to the signal, man, you gotta have your antenna out!”
He’s right, and this time-travel also occurs for me when I write. As Anais Nin said:
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
Also, take heart. Someone said to me recently, “We are all the ages we have ever been.” While a child is enrapt in the present tense of their experience, we can now create the space to reflect. If we can face our own lives, not least our beginnings, it can strengthen the iron rod of our sense of selves. The purpose of this is not to amplify some egotistical posturing, to self-aggrandise and feel warmly smug. It is to be comfortable in our honesty which in turn allows us to share our own experience and in the sharing, and the witnessing of the sharing there is then connection with others.
I’ve been told that my recent writing is brave in my openness but I have no such agenda. I am writing to explore. I look back to my youth in wonder and in doing so I have a greater understanding of the young people I encounter, whether it is through mentoring or school visits or in the stories I write and the films I make. It’s not a plan, it’s just what I do. This fish doesn’t know it’s swimming or that it’s doing so in water. I’m just looking to my own story to understand the bigger story. And to add those stories to the other building blocks that form the narrative of our existence as a species.
As individuals we are here for a moment but our stories may be atoms that inspire others or even last for as long as we do as a species. Who knows, even beyond.
I’ll finish with a quote from the great American novelist, essayist and activist James Baldwin:
“Art has to be a kind of confession… The effort, it seems to me, is: If you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms with which they are connected to other people.
This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks he is alone. That’s why art is important.”
For me, it begins with looking back. A life can take an infinite number of paths but when we zoom out are we all really that different? We’re born into some miraculous cosmological condition, we Bambi-on-ice around for a bit, we live, learn, love and lament, we even gain composure, wisdom, and then we go the way of all flesh. Engaging with it all now, that’s the ticket, to live the examined life. I’m into that.
Steven Chatterton is a writer-director, screenwriter, children’s author and broadcaster, living in London, originally from The Black Country. His focus is on storytelling from a child’s perspective, stories that show their growth and leadership while highlighting inequality and driving social mobility.
His scripts have been selected for development programmes across Europe and he holds masters degrees in Film (Birkbeck University) and Screenwriting (University of the Arts London).
He is a huge advocate of mentoring children and young people, working with several charities across London. You can follow him on Twitter: @ChattertonSD.
