nostalgia & reckoning with the passage of time

every time i come across my middle school yearbook or my scrapbook from high school, i get hit with a wave of nostalgia that, more often than not, is accompanied by some degree of nausea that settles in the pit of my stomach. 

whether it's a picture of me with friends that i no longer speak to, or a song that i used to love listening to when i was 11 in my neon green room whose walls were riddled with twilight and my chem posters, nostalgia is something that i embrace without fail. 

sometimes i find myself trying to chase moments that i think would bring me that same degree of happiness, yet when i get my hands on it i just feel disappointed. "why does't this feel like how it did when i was younger?" is something that i ask myself all the time. sometimes it gets so bad that i have to pull out my old twilight perfume that hot topic sold in '08 and take a good sniff as if to satisfy an itch that i otherwise wouldn't be able to scratch without it. 

like i know this all probably sounds so silly and maybe some of you who've taken the time to read this are going, "girl, it's never that serious," but i just can't wrap my head around the fact that time has flown by so fast. when i was little i felt that time moved soooo slow and i was naive to think that one day i'll be an adult and life will be just like a jason brooks illustration and then boom! reality came crashing down and i'm still trying to search for even an ounce of that feeling that i get when i think back to my life over a decade ago. 

idk i think this is all just to say that despite all the heartache nostalgia gives me, i appreciate all the good that it does for me, too. sometimes when i get nostalgic i take it upon myself to reach out to old friends from when i was younger, i check in and tell them that i've been thinking about them and hoping that all is well. and usually when this happens they get so excited and we go down a rabbit hole of - you guessed it - nostalgia! it brings us closer together and for a brief moment in time, we're both children again. 

now, i know i shouldn't always live in the past and i'm not saying that i do, but i do think that my love of life and the drive to create a world for myself that younger me would be proud of is something that i take great pride in. 

all in all, i will turn 30 next year. new doors will open, another decade will be staring me right in the face. maybe i'll cut my hair and pay homage to my 3rd grade school picture when i finally had the courage to chop it. i'll still listen to all my favorite artists and continue to build my cd collection. in doing so, i'll think of the days when i used my house phone to call a friend and play a new cd by an artist we both loved on my radio so that we could listen to it together despite being in completely different neighborhoods. i'll continue to check in with old friends and see how life is going for them. engagements, weddings, children... it's a whirlwind of all things adult. 

anyway, to anyone who's read this and maybe feels similar in some way, shape, or form (or not), feel free to share your own thoughts. i'm always curious to hear about how others approach nostalgia and the passage of time.

all my love,

gabriella