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Ahhhh, nostalgia! Nostalgia is something that we all experience from time to time. For me, it's quite often. Google defines nostalgia as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” For me it's just the time of reflection where I get down the lane of my best childhood memories. Nostalgia is just an emotional but a sweet feeling and to me it’s something unique.
The feeling of nostalgia for me can be triggered through several forms. The first , and this is for a lot of people, is music. As a 2000s kid I grew up listening to pop with artists like Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, or Katy Perry and hip hop with Kendrick Lamar, Megan Thee Stallion or the Migos. Both genres of music have been around for a while but for me I specifically remember listening to pop in elementary school and gradually drifted towards hip-hop and EDM styles of music in middle and high school. Now, when I go back and listen to Taylor Swift’s iconic songs like Romeo and Juliet or 22, or Shakira “Hips Don't Lie” and many other songs, it just hits differently. I am suddenly back in elementary school playing Tag with my friends on the play structure, geekng over Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, weekend trips to the library to check out the newest Magic Tree House Book or playing outside with my friends everyday.
I feel like every time I listen to music I associate it with a certain time in my life. If you play “Shut Up and Dance with Me” by WALK THE MOON , or “Rude” by MAGIC! , I would feel like my little nerdy 7th grade self. Now I listen to mostly music from TikTok. 20 years from now if you played the “remember the times we had” song or “Lottery” by K CAMP, I will remember that as the “TikTok” period. As different songs were released and my music taste changed, I also changed as a person. Music is essentially a timeline of my own life and even as life goes own it will continue to be.
Nostalgia for me also comes through travel. When I visit places that I have been to when I was very young, I feel like a child again. When I first moved to the US, I grew up in this one apartment complex for about 5 years until I moved to another location 30 minutes from it. almost 6 years later visited that apartment complex again, and walked through it. I was amazed at how much the landscape and environment had changed.
The walls which were once a creamy dusty color were now repainted a shiny gray; the area where there was once a green table and chairs ,where my friends and I had many conversations, was replaced by a marble tabletop and marble stools. There was a huge grass landscape where my friends and I used to play Tag, Soccer or Dodge ball and was now replaced by ferns, trees and various other plants. The rustic, homely and “unsophisticated” location I had grown up in was replaced by savvy and refined features. Walking through the apartment complex, it felt like the memories I had were pretty much floated away to dust. It was a bit hard to comprehend the change of my old neighborhood but it really showed to me that time really does change everything. Nostalgia hit me like a truck after that day as I relived memories in the apartment complex, barely comprehending what had changed.
Nostalgia is something that is hard to describe. I still have a lot of my life to experience but the past is something that sometimes which I do want to forget, I will always remember.