On using the past to cope with the present
In the purple glow of my childhood bedroom, I found myself playing make-believe with my memories. It was late March, and the world had just turned over. I’d flown back home to Yukon from a whirlwind, cliché trip to Paris for a study abroad, and suddenly found myself in a liminal space. The pandemic has marked not only a period of dread and panic, but also a time of longing for both an alternative future and for the certainty of the past.
For many weeks, I found myself along familiar paths: the trails in the ravine behind my home, laden with fresh snow; the too-wide roads winding along my post-recession McMansion neighborhood; driving the family car down long stretches of empty highways. In this revisiting of my old stomping grounds, I reunited with different versions of my personal history.
This is not a new habit. I have long been obsessive over memory and its preservation. My earliest memories are coloured and visceral. Even when the outlines of a memory are difficult to make out, its sounds, smells, and affect remain transportive. I have been a fervent archivist of my own history and, inadvertently, of all of the worlds I have passed through. I have meticulously sketched, photographed, and collected memories to preserve the past in an exacting way. I often find myself listening to the same handful of songs until they become inseparable from the months they’ve looped over. I keep receipts, hoard ticket stubs, and have a mismatched collection of journals that I have hauled across continents. If there were ever a definitive project in my life, it would be this.
Though I may border on the extreme, the creation and coveting of memories is an essential part of who we are. People are meaning-making creatures and we always return to the past for a reason. Rather, assessing the past allows for essential forms of processing. If not for the ability to derive new stories from the old, where would we find purpose? Often when I return to sketches and playlists, I am reminded of who I was at the time in which I made them. When I turn to old songs, I am transported to the enormity of my emotions and their respective settings.
In Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” I’m reminded of meeting stressful deadlines in the Robarts stacks. I’ve often turned to Devandra Banhart’s “Won’t You Come Over” in an effort to feel embraced in the same way I once was by an ex. I recall the pang of longing that I felt the first time I heard “Say It” by Maggie Rogers on a bitter January night. In a recent interview with Atmos, Maggie Rogers emphasizes the necessity of introspection, stating that “Art doesn’t move forward from constant production; art moves forward from reflection.” In listening to the soundtrack to my personal history, I am reminded, again and again, that I am human.
My first real entanglement with nostalgia began shortly after the passing of one of my dearest friends last year. In the headiness of grief, I felt as though I had been suspended in time. Unable—and, at times, unwilling—to move forward, I sought out any and every method of reminiscence. I was stuck. For months after the fact, I would walk through the world as a vessel for my memories—headphones in, eyes flitting to familiar buildings, conjuring up the past. I found myself listening to the playlist from her memorial on loop, thumbing through her books, spending hours in buildings that were the backdrop to our relationship, and staring at our photos until I felt immersed in my old reality.
Months later, I would learn that this pause was a result of complicated bereavement. I would go on to seek treatment, make new memories, and learn to cherish the past with a fond detachment. I’ve learned to interpret memory as just that—a brief recollection of something that can no longer be. But I don’t see those months of gridlocked life as a waste. Rather, I developed a knack for cathartic revisiting. Creating distance from the past meant to create new memories, in new environments, with new people. Much of this notion dissolved at the onset of the pandemic, and I entered a second stasis, just a year after the first.
The strange, sinking angst that set in as the pandemic took hold over these last several months has been assigned myriad terms and diagnostic labels, but the one that feels most fitting is that of grief. In an interview in the Harvard Business Review, David Kessler, a leading expert on grief, spoke candidly about the parallels between loss and COVID-19: “[The pandemic] is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”
The nature of this grief encompasses the loss of a sense of normalcy, of certainty, and of comfort. The pandemic has brought about another form of grief entirely. As a society, we have been consumed by anticipatory grief—of grieving our futures. Many, including myself, have felt a loss of purpose, which is the very thing that propels us forward. Typically, the way to combat anxieties of the future is to ground oneself in the present. But what if the present is just as fraught? Here, we must find solace in our memories.
During the pandemic, we have leaned into comfort, seeking it out in music, food, fiction, and the escapism of reality television. Just as the things we consume can bring relief, returning to our memories can be a tool for comfort. The notion of “living in the past” is often associated with a host of negative connotations: pity, judgement, sadness, and lack of ambition. But as life has come to a halt this year, perhaps the best coping mechanism we have is the ability to transport ourselves into the past. In our own minds, there exists rich worlds and stories of years past—why not relish in them when our reality is a little too much to bear?
In the National Geographic, professor Hal McDonald offers a distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Those of us who shy away from reliving the past for fear of getting “stuck” are often thinking of the restorative type. Conversely, reflective nostalgia “savors the past with the full knowledge that it is, in fact, past, and can never be relived again.” This jaunt down memory lane is done with a healthy relationship to the past. Rather than aiming to recreate the past in all of its minute details, we can use reflective nostalgia to propel us forward.
In fits of anxiety, dread, and frustration over these last few months, I’ve often closed my eyes and willed myself to remember the sensations of past experiences: of glinting sun, breathy laughter, and dirt in fingernails. Of booming concert halls, yellow streetlamps, and the curve of an old friend’s chin. All of these memories resurface in fragments, clips, blurred photographs, and half-choruses. In the fleeting nature of these glimpses of the past, I am comforted by one truth: Nothing is permanent. The feelings of today will not last forever. Just as the past becomes hazy, so too will the present.
