It seems that trends all spin in a constant rotation, churning over one irrelevant fad and boosting the relevancy of another. Picking apart the highlights from the decades, the low-waisted jeans, the scrunchies, and the flapper dress, until the years are picked apart clean. Innovation has become a thing of the past, and modernity is seen as a cleaned-up rendition in the form of a Lilo and Stitch live-action.
This ceaseless course of reminiscing about the shiny bits of the past is not only seen in the media that we consume, but in the occasional bouts of nostalgia that have crept up into our daily lives. We yearn, and we reminisce. We focus on our past lives, our teenage years, and our childhoods. We look back at them for comfort, plaguing our minds with how good it was—making us forget how good it still can be.
We shelter ourselves in our dreams, the big ones that we wore proudly on our chests during career day in elementary school. You know, the big ones that we keep tucked away on the highest shelf in the bookshelves of our offices. We used to dream big, in fact, too big for our little bodies. Where have the “I want to be a vet”, “I want to be an astronaut”, or hell, the “I want to be the first woman president” aspirations gone? We have grown up; it is painfully true. We have seen the cruel and just brutal realities of the world, and our answer to it is to stop following our dreams and to start reminiscing on them. We have sacrificed our creativity, our fun, our happiness, our silliness for conformity.
This clinging to the warmth of the past is what truly kills the person. We forget to push past the sticky-sweet smell of the class Valentine’s parties thrown in elementary school or the first feel of a heated rush to the cheeks and the stomach after seeing a crush in the hallway. We confine ourselves to a strict timeline, stating that it’s immature to feel such a thing for a person you’ve only seen in passing or that we have grown out of having a simple Valentine’s party with your friends. We reminisce, and reminisce until we simply run out of time to reminisce again. We sell ourselves short out of a life of doing and acting, to live a life of longing. We hold ourselves so close to our nostalgia that we come to believe that we can age ourselves out of our dreams, our goals, and our love.