Channel Sepia.
I want to talk about Nostalgia. Nostalgia is a tenderhearted yearning or forlorn affection for the past, usually for a period with gleeful correlation. Simply put, this is equivalent to daydreaming about the former days. Now, let me be the first to say that I adore Nostalgia. I strongly believe that it is the gateway for those “feel-good” hormones we need such as serotonin and dopamine. Here’s the issue though, sometimes we allow nostalgia to let us slip back into situations and circumstances that aren’t good for us, on the grounds that we tend to tweeze out the good and neglect reality.
For exemplification, I can recall a time when I severed ties with a former partner. A few months after the breakup, I began to miss him. He and I got back in contact and after a few conversations I began to remember why we split up in the first place. You see, I got caught up in those nostalgic memories and this caused me to back track to a relationship that I wasn’t aligned with anymore. I had forsaken reality for a few good memories. I also want to provide a platonic example of this seeing as nostalgic mistakes aren’t limited to romance only. In my college days I did have a friendship with an individual who seemed to make it a point to incorporate malice into our friendship. I never actually did anything to this person, but she found a weird delight in trying to hurt me. We would fall out and make our way back to each other after a few months of not speaking, simply because we had great memories with one another. To make a long story short, this person purposely got involved with an old flame of mine and pretended to be empathetic about. It was at that moment that I learned, great memories with a person will never triumph over reality.
Listen, I understand that it’s easy to get caught up in nostalgia. We often crave past moments of bliss and love, especially on our bad days. I just want to encourage you to be careful with your thoughts, so you don’t end up reverting back to an unaligned state of affairs. Look, we all know when someone or something doesn’t fit in our lives anymore. The aspect of growing out of people and things we’ve made memories with can be uncomfortable. Trust me I get it, but using nostalgia to stay tied to that person or that thing that’s no longer good for you is doing yourself a disservice.
