Nostalgia isn’t always a bad thing

A bit of a different post today with me thinking about the time I was packing everything to move and how things have changed now that I’m settled here and have been for over a year now.

I found a book and in it I had written a list of questions to ask before an operation I was about to have when I was 10. Those questions were the same ones I asked 10 years after that, age 19 and about to go in to have my lip and nose fixed. It hit me how young I was then, how scared I had been to have this operation where we had to travel. I missed school! Which was one of the worst parts as a kid because I got moved seats and had a lot of work to catch up on.

I also found some things from when I was a child and interested in different clubs and activities and it hit me how hopeful I was then. How much I wanted to succeed and do well, mostly to prove it to the guys teaching me that I could.  Not that being hopeful is wrong, but that I wanted so desperately to have their approval and thought that was the best thing. Now, I’ve moved away from that club and no longer look at it that way. I was doing the best I could do, I was putting so much energy and effort in and when I eventually realised that I wasn’t being given the same consideration in return it broke me a little bit, but I’m past that now. I spent a while not able to do anything to do with that and this year I’ve made the decision that when clubs open back up I’ll go to another one and try it again. I’ll make a go of it now, but not with the same attitude I had then.

I’ve still got my first guitar. It’s sitting at the side of the couch and I still play it fairly regularly. Acoustic, standard tuning and it’s beautiful to play folk and country on because it’s got this really rich sound. Last year during the lockdown the strings snapped and I couldn’t play it for a little while, but I had my first go at replacing the strings and tuning it back in like that and it was great. I remember playing it as a kid and struggling so much and now a lot of those chords are easier, some because I got used to playing them, others because my hands grew and I could actually play them properly. Looking back at this guitar has a lot of memories tied up in it, but it doesn’t make me sad. It makes me happy that I got to have them, that I still think of some silly things from when I was 11 or 12 like “the Dory scale – no wait that’s a fish”. 

When I was packing my bags and the car to move I was getting sad. I was leaving home for the first time, moving out into a new place with new people where I didn’t have a job, had a few friends and my partner but nothing beyond that. I had never lived on my own or even been out of the town I grew up in. It was a big change, but seeing these things that I have around me from my parent’s home and my childhood has made it easier. I still have the same guitar, I still have that mouse mat I was given back in primary school and those star wars mugs. Just because I’m moving on with things doesn’t mean that I have to leave the past behind me, and for those things that I do want to leave in the past, that isn’t always a bad thing. 

I want to do martial arts again, but I want to leave the training three times a week and practicing on the off days behind. That wasn’t good for me, but doing the exercise once or twice a week? Yeah, that’s going to be brilliant. I want to keep playing my guitar, that doesn’t mean I’m the same person as when I first started playing. I’m now past the operations, but it doesn’t mean I can’t look back on those books with questions in them and remember how scared I was back then and how much I wanted to know what the future would bring for me with it. It just means that I look at it and see how far that I’ve come, how brave I’ve been and how much I took in my stride. 

If you’re getting weighed down in nostalgia, yearning for the way that things were before then it isn’t the best. It’s exhausting and you’ll burn yourself out trying to make it like that again now, but being nostalgic, looking back at a time you were happy and trying to understand why and what made it that way for you? That’s not a bad thing. 

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.

#2020 #nostalgia #2021 #reflecting #newyear #past