Why does the past feel so euphoric? How does it let me so easily overlook its abundance of misery?

I don’t know if I feel this more than most — I might, because I feel everything more than most — but nostalgia rips through my chest and touches my heart with the intensity of a thousand suns. 

Its pang actuates my emotional circuitry unlike anything in the world. The smell of a rubber ball from the grocery store toy machines that reminds me of being in fourth grade. The taste of a certain buffalo wing sauce that brings me back to a certain childhood night alone, watching Jason in Manhattan. The Outkast song that transports me to my college dorm room and reminds me that life can have joy in it. The feeling of new love, and its ability to override reason. 

All of these are nuanced and weird, but they are mine. 

Don Draper once said that in Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound’. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. 

This feels right. It hurts in ways I can’t describe, and yet it somehow brings a smile to my reluctant face. When I think back on the early years of my children’s lives, I am saturated by the golden hue of its blissful highs, rarely recalling its incessant, insidious weight. When I think about my marriage, I obsess over the playful and intimate moments, but fail to assign my invisibility and despair its proper consequence. 

Maybe this is necessary, a protective mechanism to guard our sanity. Maybe if we could recall the acuteness of the pain, our minds would devolve into perpetual torment. I mean, more-so so than already exists that is. 

This is especially relevant in my life right now as I grieve something that only existed in fragments, in splintered slices of hope that were more delusion than truth. 

Maybe nostalgia is just our mind’s way of rewriting the past into something we can bear to carry. It dulls the sharpest edges, softens the worst moments, and leaves behind a version of our lives that feels almost beautiful.

Not entirely true, however, but true enough to keep us moving forward.