I am very much a person who experiences nostalgia frequently. In fact, I have a playlist that’s labeled “high school nostalgia”. I started adding songs to it so that when I’m working on my book, which relies heavily on transcribing old journals, I can get deeper into my feelings by listening to the music of that time period. Even if it’s older songs from before the 90s, if I listened to it when I was in high school, I add it to the playlist. It’s all about the feeling that it evokes in me.
I got to thinking about that nostalgia recently. Why do I have that feeling when I think about the 90s and everything associated with that time? It was not a good time in my life. To be sure I was even correctly calling it nostalgia, I googled the definition and here’s what I found:
“A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”
And there’s the rub… “with happy personal associations”. High school sucked! I lost my virginity at way too young of an age. There were many nasty rumors about me that I was perpetually bullied for the entire time. The 90s were good in the fact that social media didn’t exist. So the bullying that existed at school did not follow me home. But my home life sucked too! My father was a narcissistic asshole that yelled at me for reasons only known to him. None of it certainly made sense to me. My mother didn’t help or do anything to stop it. All she did was take me to a psychiatrist when the effects of his constant criticism and anger toward me developed into a clinical depression diagnosis.
So why am I nostalgic for that time period? I look at posts on social media that reminisce about those times. I see pictures of items from back then and feel a tug in my heart. Like this Vtech phone. I had this exact one in my bedroom because back then, I had my own phone line in my room. Lately there’s a trend of people identifying if they were living room kids or bedroom kids. I was a bedroom kid. That was my safe space. I spent as little time in the living room with my parents as possible.
And maybe that’s it. I’m remembering my time in my bedroom. The phone, the lava lamp, the black light, the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling and every wall. The stereo where I listened to the music now on my nostalgia playlist. Where I sat on my bed and wrote in those journals I’m transcribing now.
There were good times. I had a best friend that I worked with at Dairy Queen. The time she and I spent working together and then getting something to eat after our shift before going to this pool hall called Speakeazy’s to play 9 ball. Back then, we were allowed in because we weren’t trying to drink too. We just grabbed a table, always the one in the back right corner, smoked a bunch of cigarettes while playing and dumping money in the jukebox. Some of the songs on my playlist remind me of her. We listened to “Only God Knows Why” by Kid Rock a lot in the car. We turned the volume up as high as it would go and screamed along to the line, “You get what you put in and people get what they deserve.”
Even now though, with the Christmas season here, I am filled with nostalgia for the Christmases of my childhood. None of my Christmas memories are tainted by negativity from my father or whatever happened to be going on at school at the time.
So strong is it this time of year that I am eyeing a new star for our Christmas tree. For years, my husband and I have had an angel made out of gold wire on top. But I’m longing now for one reminiscent of what was on top of the tree when I was a kid. Kind of like this one I found on Amazon:
I think when it comes down to it, nostalgia is random and can really be traced back to anything. Or nothing. Maybe it’s as simple as remembering a time when we felt happy. Whether that was a long period of time, or as short as the length of a song that you sing with your best friend after work. So I guess the answer to my original question…why all the nostalgia…is simply because despite everything negative I experienced growing up, there were happy times too. The bad is easier to remember, but the good is what’s most important.
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