Nostalgia is often heralded as a good thing nowadays. Perhaps good isn’t the right word. Comfortable? Comparative? I don’t know how to phrase it, but nostalgia feels like this kind of infection that people have. The judgmental fuck I am, I see it in others as this return to times of safety and comfort and simpler times. Lower cognition, lower stakes. It’s arrested development – I have it, too.
Mine is a different sort, I guess, nowadays, and it’s more in line with the classical definition. Nostalgia comes from the Greek “nostos” meaning coming home/homecoming/etc. and “algos” meaning pain. So, the pain of coming home, or the pain that comes with thinking about going home. According to Wikipedia, my greatest ally, the term got a lot of traction in the 1600s as a medical diagnosis for Swiss soldiers who became so afflicted with homesickness and anxiety that they would become ill, or desert the battlefield, or just die. It was so bad that certain songs were outlawed because they would incite such restlessness and pain in the troops. It was a medical condition, and a deadly one at that.
My nostalgia, the overdramatic and willingly pitiful person I am, is similar to this. It hurts. Being in a grocery store hurts, eating hurts, sleeping hurts. I am so overwhelmed by being alive because the context of my living is so estranged from myself.
Did you know I haven’t been to McDonalds since the breakup? Did you know I haven’t bought any of the snacks I love? I can’t because everything is this godawful nostalgic trigger of my ex. Everything feels like a trigger nowadays. And it’s infinitely exhausting, being haunted by this ghost day in and day out. It is past this point of thinking about a rose-colored past where I could be happy and loved, it is this reality where the absence of context has completely bedridden me. I don’t really feel at home in the world anymore. It feels like so much of it is hers. And I don’t begrudge that, I don’t resent her for it, that’s not her fault. But I am so exhausted of being reminded of her by the simplest of occurrences.
My solution to this so far, much in the same way as my last post, is to try to create new contexts in which I exist. I listen to a lot of country music now, I drink more than I should, I go to new restaurants and try to create new memories with new people.
But it feels like I’m trying to paint over a canvas that’s already been painted, and no matter how much more color I throw over it, the background seeps through everything. It feels like she still pours out of every little thing in my house, like there’s a leak somewhere and she keeps dripping onto me. It’s to the point where it feels inescapable, pervasive. It feels like this is how I’ll feel forever. The color of Jane will always be the backdrop of my life. I can’t handle that.
jeez, louise 