Nostalgia

It comes in waves. All of the sudden, I miss everyone. One day you’re 17 and graduating high school. The nerves and excitement are unlike anything you’ve ever felt before. You get sentimental and swear to your high school friends that you’ll keep in touch and be friends forever. Then you blink. You’re 21 and about to graduate college, and you swear that your nerves and emotions have never been so raw. You’re excited and scared, deeply emotional and impossibly nostalgic. You’ve got the whole world at your fingertips. Then you blink. You’re 23 and you don’t know where the time went. You swear you were just 17, 21. You remember being so vulnerable and raw and you actually find yourself missing it. Because now you feel numb and old and constantly nostalgic for the days when you felt like you could set the world on fire. I know your 20’s are supposed to be free and exciting. It’s a time to feel and see and do as much as you can. As a 20 something you’re in the prime of your life. Life is full of possibilities and people are curious as to what you have to offer the world. It won’t always be this way. In fact, right now is the youngest you’ll ever be again. So what happens when you’re 23 and all you can feel is longing and nostalgia? Why can’t I live in the moment and enjoy the right now instead of constantly looking back? One day I will look at this time in my life with longing and wish I could be 23 again. So why do I enjoy moments more once they’ve passed? Why can’t I enjoy the moment as it is happening? I need to learn to enjoy the here and now, because it won’t be here for long.

"We spend time building something up and then we don't enjoy it. We sit there terrified someone's gonna take it away from us."

Plans Shmans.

When you are younger, your perception of time and age is skewed. You think your babysitter, your student teacher, and basically anyone over the age of 15 is old. So you make plans and predictions based off of your skewed idea of time and aging, and sadly, it never quite works out how you planned. When I was younger, I never really pictured myself graduating high school. It’s not that I pictured myself flunking out or anything like that, I just never really mentally got past high school. Then as high school fast approached, I could never picture my life after college. I assumed, much like my mental block of graduating high school, that eventually with time I would be able to picture my life after college. However college came and went. I’m now a year and a half post-grad and I still can’t picture my life after college. High school has a definite end. 4 years and then you move on. College has the same definite end. But the real world? No definite next step, no definite end. And that scares the crap out of me. I think we base our predictions of our lives and our futures by what we grew up with. My parents got married when they were 20 years old, so I kind of assumed that I would finish school and move in with my husband. When you’re young and making plans you never account for the fact that you might be eternally single, or have to move back in with your parents, or move to a random city where you don’t know anybody to chase a dream that you’re not really sure about. It all becomes quite unclear and really nothing like you imagined. My big plan was to graduate, get a job that I loved, move out on my own, fall madly in love, get married, and start having children by the time I was 30. I’m currently 23 and have none of these things. Realistically, at the pace I’m going, I’m not really on track for my plan. Which I’m learning to accept. Plans change. Heck, if I stuck with my childhood plans, I would be living with my best friend Sarah and professional figure skating. Things have a way of working themselves out in due time. I get that, I really do. It’s just hard once you graduate and everyone goes on their own separate paths at their own separate pace. One of my friends is moving to New York to attend grad school at NYU. She’s getting an apartment and living in a big city and studying to get her masters. I can’t help but think how grown up that all sounds. And my other best friend just got engaged and is moving to Kentucky with her fiance. So it’s no wonder I can’t help but feel stuck or left behind. I’ve always moved at a slower pace than everyone else, so I shouldn’t be surprised. So who knows what the future might bring. Honestly, I’m excited to see where life takes me. But I can’t help but feel a little sad for the loss of my childhood plans.

To wrap it up, there’s a song I heard on a CD a friend made for me and the words really hit me while I was driving the other day. There’s a part that says: “Ever since you were a child, you had a picture in your dreams, of how you wanted things to turn out, of what you’d like your life to be. Now you’re living with an image, that you hardly recognize. You don’t have to gloss it over, like everything’s fine.” This is so freeing to me. I know that I can’t dwell on the past, but this just reminds me that it’s okay to feel sad and afraid and confused and stuck when things don’t turn out like you planned. You know what they say, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans”. Haha, God. Haha.


　

Everything's changing.

“We either adapt to change or get left behind. It hurts to grow; anybody who tells you anything else is lying. But here’s the truth, sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same; and sometimes, sometimes change is good, and sometimes change is everything.”
If you know me at all you know that change is like, my least favorite thing ever (along with confrontation, wasabi, and Nickelback). People say that change is constant, which is true, because if it wasn’t then we’d all be living a Groundhog Day type scenario, which would super suck since that is another one of my least favorite things ever. So while change is constant, there are definitely different levels of change. For instance, when I’m at school and I have a routine and a schedule, things change very little from day to day. I change my clothes, I might change what I eat, and there might be a few other variations in my day. But all in all, the changes are relatively small and don’t produce a lot of anxiety. But then there are times when it seems everything is changing all at once. Schedules change, opinions change, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and people all change. And when all of these things start changing at once, it becomes the perfect storm of anxiety for me. It’s not that I don’t accept change. I do. If I didn’t accept change, I’d never grow and I’d miss out on some pretty amazing opportunities. My problem is that I delay change by holding onto the past. I get left behind. While others grow and change and adapt, I get stuck. I get stuck watching everyone else move on with their lives while I sit and hold onto every little bit of normalcy I possibly can. So yes, I’d agree that “we either adapt to change or get left behind” and that “it hurts to grow”, and even that “sometimes change is good, and sometimes change is everything.” However, I don’t understand that “sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same”. That’s a lie that other people tell people like me in order to reduce anxiety. But I don’t need to be lied to. The more things change, the more they change. They don’t stay the same. Nothing ever does. But I guess, if nothing ever changed there’d be no butterflies, right?