I am sentimental for everything. Places. People. Smells. You could call me a nostalgia junkie.
If it were possible to inject the feeling of beach bonfires my friends and I had as teenagers on carefree summer nights into my veins, I would be mainlining that shit constantly.
If I could do whippets of the feeling of warmth that filled my family’s home during the best Christmases of my childhood, I would immediately asphyxiate to death from huffing too hard.
If I could snort the feeling of driving across New Mexico for the first time and being awed by the sight of the beautiful, massive red rock formations that punctuate the desert, I’d do so many bumps of it that my septum would fall out of my nose.
If something, anything, has ever given me a ✨feeling✨ of any kind, best believe I want to be able to access the memories of that feeling over and over again in perpetuity.
Soon after the pandemic began in 2020, my job went fully remote. I was at a personal crossroads in my life at the time anyway, so I decided to move from Austin back home to my parents’ house in California to figure out what I wanted to do next.
I slept in my childhood bedroom, still untouched even though I hadn’t lived there in many years. There was ample opportunity for nostalgia there, and in ways that often surprised me.
One morning, I was awakened by the sound of the Santa Ana winds on the first windy day of the season. From my twin-sized bed, I listened as the powerful, sustained gusts hit the eucalyptus trees that line the neighborhood.
If you don’t know, the thin, dry leaves of the eucalyptus tree produce the ideal rustling sound in the wind. I might not even call what they do “rustling.” Eucalyptus leaves seem like they’re having such a good time blowing in the wind, I’d say they were “shimmying.” If you’re looking for the perfect tree to blow air onto at 40 mph, look no further than the eucalyptus.
Hearing this satisfying tree music, I was instantly transported back to childhood, getting ready for school in this same bedroom and hearing those same eucalyptus leaves shimmying outside my window whenever the Santa Anas came roaring through.
That’s right, folks: I’m so horny for nostalgia that even the sound of leaves elicits of a flood of sentimentality in me.
As does the taste of the Western Bacon Cheeseburger from Carl’s Jr.©, which I once ate before going trick or treating one Halloween as a child. That core memory formed an association so strong that I still get a craving for that burger every Halloween. Obscure, right?!
Or the sound of any song from Taylor Swift’s Fearless album, which I discovered when I was working on my first film after college. I would listen to it on repeat during my long commutes to L.A. and now whenever I hear it, it’s like I’m back in that Volkswagen driving on the 210 freeway, singing “You Belong With Me” in between yelling obscenities at every other driver on the road.
Or the smell of the shrink-wrap on the CDs that greeted you when you walked into a Warehouse Music store. God, the air was thick with microplastics then.
Sometimes I’ll get a whiff of Banana Boat sunscreen and it can paint an entire picture of summer days from my childhood when my grandpa would take us to the pool. We would swim for hours and he would buy us nachos from the snack bar, which had the runniest nacho cheese legally allowable for consumption. I remember shoveling those runny nachos into my mouth with my chlorine-soaked fingers and washing it down with the coldest, most refreshing Cherry Cokes I’ve ever had. Those meals were gourmet and those pool days with my grandpa were perfect. And the fact that, as humans, we can activate core memories like this FROM A WHIFF OF SUNSCREEN is wild.
Hell, I’m also nostalgic for the times in my life that I didn’t even LIKE!
In college, I sometimes had evening classes and I HATED going to them. I was a commuter student, so I’d have to drive on the freeway at rush hour to get there in time. I’d arrive at the parking lot right at sunset. I’d step out of my car into the perfect 70-something degree air, while everything around me was draped in the most amazing purples and pinks the southern California sky had to offer – but I was so annoyed to be there in the first place that I didn’t even appreciate it then. Now those evenings have become the soothing images I pull up from my brain’s memory files when I’m trying to fall asleep at night.
Sometimes I’m even nostalgic for old jobs that I quit with both middle fingers held high. Not because I miss those jobs, but because I miss something else that’s much harder to describe. I miss that old version of myself, and I wish I could visit that past version of me and tell her that everything is going to end up alright – so much better, even.
One night, during the thick of the pandemic with nowhere to go, I became so bored and restless at my parents’ house that I got in my car and started driving past old stomping grounds just to see if I could score a couple of hits of some sweet, sweet nostalgia. I wound up driving to my old job – the last one I had in Hollywood before moving to Austin.
I drove into the same parking garage in Glendale that I had loathed driving to every day just a few years prior. Back then, I would sit in my car until the last possible minute while leaving juuuuuust enough time to walk to the elevator and into my office at 9 am on the dot. (8:57 a.m. was that time, by the way. Sometimes I could push it to 8:58 a.m. if I really needed that extra minute to sit in existential dread in the car.)
And there I was again years later, back at a place I didn’t even like, but one that represented a time that I can no longer have.
I remembered the courtyard adorned with strings of those little twinkly lights, and the big ornate water fountain that was always broken, and the foosball table that was inexplicably outside for some reason. It was still there. (Why?)
I walked the same route I used to walk on my daily 10-minute breaks, around the building and down Brand Avenue and back. I remembered the way the light from the sun would hit the buildings during my 12 o’clock walk and the way it would hit the buildings during my 3 o’clock walk. I felt like a detective returning to the scene of a cold case, retracing my steps to see if there was anything I had missed.
I remembered the smell of fresh baked bread wafting out from Porto’s, taunting to me to come inside even though there was always a line 300 people deep at any given moment.
I remembered how I would sometimes take the “long way” back to the office to extend my walks by a few extra minutes on the days that I really needed it – usually when I was too invested in a daydream I was playing in my head about some unseen future time when I would be happy and hopeful and thriving.
It would take me years, but eventually, I would even become sentimental about this era – one of uncertainty and anxiety – because I know now that the story got so much better.
All of those memories matter because they each represent a domino that had to fall into place in order to move the next events along.
It was around this time that I began writing down these moments of nostalgia in a journal because I am, if nothing else, an insufferable writer who will romanticize absolutely anything.
And I’m here to recommend the same to my fellow nostalgia junkies out there. Become an insufferable writer! Be your own biographer! Romanticize the shit out of everything! You only get one life, be as cringe as you want to be! 😌
Nostalgia comes with a kind of longing for the past, and I think that longing can mean different things for different people. For me, I think that sense of melancholy can be transformed into a healthier sense of appreciation when you articulate those memories into words, and then use those words to process your feelings.
Most importantly: write the shit down as it’s happening and as you’re feeling it. Make yourself nostalgic for the present, right now. It’s a fantastic exercise in gratitude.
Here’s one example of a travel journal entry I wrote in July 2021:
Drinking coffee in the small yard outside of my Airbnb in Flagstaff. To call the weather “perfect” would be an understatement. The air is fresh and clean and smells like pine. It has all the feel of a mountain town without the hassle of driving all the way up a fucking mountain.
My Airbnb host said they were experiencing a “heat wave” at the moment – which meant temperatures hit the high 80s in this dry mountain town. Lady, until you’ve walked your dog in 95 degree heat with 90% humidity at 10 o’clock at night, you have no idea what “heat” is. This is the most temperate weather I’ll have the pleasure of experiencing for the foreseeable future as my journey toward Austin continues.
So I’ll sit out here in the yard, sipping coffee and enjoying the most pleasant 75 degree 8:00 a.m. of my life, shaded by pine trees and grateful that I’ve stumbled onto this little reprieve from the oppressive southwest summer.
I realize it sounds like I’m claiming that I just invented JOURNALING. (I did not.) It seems so simple, and yet it took me SO LONG to make this a habit. I’m a writer, sure, but I only write stuff that I intend to publish so I can receive GLORY and PRAISE and COMPLIMENTS. Why would I write something that’s just for me?
Well, I know now that you write things just for yourself because one day you might want to transport yourself back to your perfect summer morning in Flagstaff and appreciate it again.
Or you might want to reflect on a much shittier time and appreciate how far you’ve come.
Whenever you feel something worth remembering, write it down. Take stock of every feeling, every smell, every sound. It’s the details that will help you revisit these moments with ease, as if you’ve built your own personal time machine that you can use to travel back in time whenever you’re feeling ✨nostalgic.✨