danielle axelrod

Dear Reader,

I’ve been sick all week.

Like the kind that keeps you home from work and really makes you wish your mom lived a little closer than 10 & ½ hours away. 

The kind that was so exhausting I could barely muster the energy to do anything but watch reruns of The O.C. and Friends for three days straight.

The miserable kind, is what I mean.

And with a full week of no work, no social life, and no one around (thanks to a work trip for my roomie), my mind did what it loves to naturally do best: spiral.

Maybe it was the choice of TV shows watched, or maybe it was the ache of being sick without my mama around, or maybe it was the pure delusion from too much Mucinex. Whatever it was, my mind latched on to the nauseating ride of nostalgia. And it refused to let go.

Nostalgia can be a beautiful thing – evoking sweet emotions from memories you’ll likely cherish for life. But it can also be an incredibly deceptive liar. And I guess that’s why I decided to deeper investigate its rather annoying presence this week.

See, it’s not just this week that my mind seems to latch on to the memories of the past that prompt me to long for a time when my biggest worry was when I would find more time to play The Sims or who was going to make my Myspace Top 8.

This nostalgia thing happens to plague my mind a lot more than I lead on, and I’m starting to hate it. Because the more I long for polished images of my past, the less I can embrace the purposeful intentions of my present.

Because let me tell you one thing about nostalgia: it’s a liar. Well, not completely. It’s one of those sneaky liars that tells half-truths, leaving pertinent details out. Like how I can remember 2020 as one of the best years of my life because I got to spend so much quality time with my parents laughing and making dumb videos. But it will leave out the misery of having to work full-time in a global pandemic, the longing for normalcy, and the social restrictions that had me begging to go back to a time before COVID-19 existed.

Or how it will convince me that high school was the best 4 years of my life yet forget to include the memory of heartbreak, lost friendships, and weight of balancing academics and athletics while trying to figure out the rest of my life.

And there is this tricky side of nostalgia that forgets to remind you that you are looking back through the lens of who you are now. But as much as you may wish to experience the past as your present self, you can’t. You can’t go back. 

But the ache of familiarity and the plea to go make amends using the lessons learned on the other side can be so magnetizing it will cause you you to focus on a hypothetical rather than embrace the here and now.

I’m realizing that nostalgia has been distracting me all week. Causing me to ache for what once was because I am not comfortable or confident in what currently is. 

I am disappointed because this is not what I thought it would be.

I am mourning because I miss the innocence I once held before I knew so much about the world.

I am grieving because of the choices I wish I could go back and fix, just so my present would look different than it does now.

But if you know me, you know that my present isn’t all that bad, I guess.

And it’s not that I hate my life.

I guess the disappointment can sometimes convince me that this is it. This is all there is. Even though, typing it out, I feel utterly foolish admitting to that.

Because frankly, underneath it all, I know that God is too vast and sovereign to leave us stuck in a season. 

But boy, can the lie of nostalgia convince me that my best is behind me. And this is it. This is all I’ll ever be and all I’ll ever do.

Ridiculous, I guess.

But I’m practicing being honest here, remember?

I think the enemy loves to cause us to look back with rose colored glasses. To see only the good parts of our past and forget the hard reality that accompanied those good parts.

Because here’s the thing I’m learning.

Life will always be both broken and beautiful.

We will always be reflecting and reaching.

And I will always mourn what was lost and make room for what’s to gain.

It is only when I lose sight of the other side of the “and” that I am fooling myself into thinking the best is behind me.

Nostalgia can be a beautiful thing. It can remind us of times when grandparents weren’t sick, and innocence was preserved, and social media wasn’t rotting our brains.

But it can be deceptive, too. And I am realizing that while it is good to reflect and remember the good things, it is incredibly destructive to yearn for a season that is no longer serving me. 

After all, does God not know what He’s doing?

Does He not have a plan for me now, like He always did in the past?

This season isn’t my favorite. I’ll say that with pure honesty.

But I know well enough now that I will miss it someday. I’ll look back in a few years and long for its sweet moments of solidarity, peaceful nights of Jeopardy and puppy snuggles, and thoughts void of future pain.

So, here’s my prayer – and maybe you want to steal it too:

Lord, help me see.

Help me not to miss what you have for me in this season. Help me to embrace the now. Help me to love this time for what it is fully, so I won’t regret that I didn’t one day. When it’s hard, hold me. When it’s good, show me. When it’s quiet, comfort me. And when it’s quite beautiful, help me capture it. 

Don’t let the glimpses of the past make me dread the present or lose hope for my future.

There is something beautiful in this, too.

Don’t let me wait until I’m looking back to see it.

♡ Sincerely,

This Nostalgic Writer