by Vani Viswanathan
My partner and I often end up discussing my tendency to, as he calls it, ‘live in the past.’ Everyday I regale him with stories from my college years, my childhood and my school friends, my struggles overseas and my work, often ending with a wistful sigh and an ‘I used to be strong/motivated/ambitious/independent (fill in as appropriate)’, making an obvious reference to how I don’t feel any of that now.
One day, he stopped me short, and asked if I really had been any of those – motivated, independent, ambitious, and such – or I was referring to some imagined ‘reality’, a perception that I was someone I wasn’t, actually.
That got me thinking. Why did I feel the need to reach out to the past so often?
I’ve always been a sucker for nostalgia. Depending on my mood, I float, swim or sink in a pool of memories from recent years. I have a partner in crime in this in one of my best friends, who is better than me in remembering incidents and random fragments of our college life. We now live in different continents, have gone through intense life changes, and still manage to keep each other updated. Not one conversation goes by when we don’t refer to a shared memory – often a happy one, wonder at how times have changed and we’re no longer the silly kids who’d spent hours crying over non-issues, had ridiculous fashion sense, but most importantly, were so easily satisfied or tickled by the most banal things. We remind each other of the crazy decisions, intense study sessions and ambitions of those years, and the drive with which we approached things, identified commitments and motivated each other.
I realised that whenever I finished a conversation with her or other such friends with whom I’ve spent significant amounts of time, I felt happier, refreshed. Here was someone who knows me from a different time, when I was, as it seems, a different person – the one I wanted to be.
It’s not always this rosy, though. When I’m going through a tough time, I look through my journals over the years, and realise that a simple venting session would so easily pull me out of whatever difficulty I was facing then. I feel amazed that just a few years ago, I could meet the challenge head on in my own quiet, diplomatic fashion, while now, I feel myself spiralling into helplessness, and as much as I hate it, self-pity. These journeys into the past shake me up and shame me into brushing those annoying feelings off, and at least try to focus on what lies ahead, on finding a solution to the problem.
Somewhere, I’ve come to rely on nostalgia to help me be, once again, young, hungry and daring. I traverse the world of yesterdays to try to make sense of my todays.
I don’t know if this is a sustainable way of feeding my future, and if after a few years, my ability to derive inspiration from nostalgia would reduce. But for now, when I remember the time I climbed into a friend’s room through an open window late at night, I realise I was never always this woman with tightly-held rules for behaviour. When I recollect that a long walk with ice cream would make me swallow sadness caused by a monumental (for that point) problem and look at life with new vigour, I realise that I’m capable of crossing my current hurdles too, and that these too, shall pass.
Reaching out to the past helps me understand that I wasn’t imagining reality; rather, it convinces me that, defined by my own terms, I was independent, motivated and strong. However, defining reality today by those same terms, I find those elements often missing. By digging into nostalgia, I find evidence of my reality as it was, and believe that I should be able to get back to being that person. At least, there was that possibility, since I was trying to be someone that I had been just a few years ago.
And so, I decided that indulging the past to motivate my present self wasn’t all that bad, as long as I measured the doses: it is important to ensure I don’t lose sight of the todays living in denial of the difficulties that the present poses.
