Late Night Nostalgia

This piece was written in December 2025.

TW for depression, rumination, and mental health struggles.

Lately, I’ve been yearning for the past. While I do have good memories to look back on, the year I’ve been yearning for doesn’t include much sunshine or rainbows. Honestly, it was one of the worst years in my life.

That doesn’t stop me from thinking about it, though! 

On a recent drive home, I pulled up a random Spotify playlist called “2020-2021 alt tiktok <3,” and when “All The Things She Said” started playing, I felt an odd warmth in my chest. It was strange to hear a bunch of songs that I haven’t listened to in years — it’s safe to say this playlist brought me back to my sophomore year of high school. 

Was this a good year? Well, kind of. I’m sure it had its good parts; I just don’t really remember them. What I do remember, however, is how much I was struggling. It was a bad year, and my headspace was chaotic.

So, why did the reminder of my former struggles feel comforting? Why did driving in the pitch black (minus my sh*tty headlights) bring me a sense of pleasure? 

About a month ago, the “Drag Path” edits were hitting every fandom. I remember feeling the lyrics so viscerally, and even though the song is about God for Tyler Joseph, for me, it was about mental health. It was about the comfort that sadness can bring. The feeling of crawling into your hole and hiding from the world, because isn’t it just so much easier to wield sadness as a weapon against yourself rather than a shield?

I think, for me, being sad feels controllable. Obviously, it’s not just something I can shove away, but it is something that I can accommodate. Now, it’s much easier to remind myself of all the reasons I don’t need to be sad without cause and comfort myself with the presence of my friends or girlfriend. However, back in my sophomore year of high school, I often sat in that sadness. I relished in it, thinking that I deserved it, or that I had to be sad so that I could write better, like all those great depressed poets. 

Presently, I’ve become a master at the art of journaling, where I find it easy to draft pages processing Why do I feel sad right now? I had a good day. Writing it all down clears my head, and I wish that sophomore me had known this could help. 

But back to now—and back to me clawing my way through a drag path to fall back into my sad little hole. Honestly, I think part of my reason for writing this piece is to avoid that hole. My quick typing is forming a blockade over the opening, keeping it from pulling me back in. I’m being proactive, I guess, because I know I shouldn’t be yearning for the awful year I had. I shouldn’t be romanticizing a time when I felt so awful. I shouldn’t, and yet…

I kind of am. 

Listening to that playlist really reminded me how good music can feel when you are sad. The artists put words to the hole in your chest and the heavy weight in your stomach — all the feelings that you can’t quite name. They’re singing exactly how I feel. Those lyrics… they just hit. 

I have specific artists I listened to during prolonged sad periods of my life. For that reason, I can’t really listen to artists like Phoebe Bridgers or Billie Eilish unless I’m truly, deeply upset and want to wallow in the feelings I’ve had. What’s a little bit funny is that my favorite artists are Radiohead and Gigi Perez, which, yeah, I know. That makes it sound like I’m sad all the time because I listen to them all the time. But, I don’t know, I think I like them so much because their lyrics are visceral, their accompaniment is gutting. I relate to these songs in a different way than those “sad songs” I can’t listen to anymore.

So, listening to “2020-2021 alt tiktok <3” really put me back into the sad point of my life where I was listening to them. I truly thought I was “indie” because I was sad, which, looking back, isn’t true. While I’ve heard people say memory is a form of time travel, I think we should start adding music to that, too. Maybe it's just because I’m a daydreamer with a huge imagination, but as I was driving to these songs, I became my old self. I felt like I could see all the people I knew in my peripheral vision — shadows and ghosts that vanished once I turned my head — and felt my chest tingle with the familiar pain of losing them. I felt truly different from my 2025 self; I felt like I was time traveling into the past. 

A bad past, mind you. But the past nonetheless. 

I don’t know if there’s a moral here, but my goal in writing this is, at least for myself, to not fall back into the hole. Sure, there are going to be sad days where I can’t do anything but wallow, but there can also be preventative days. I can remind myself that people love me and there are things that I love to do, and maybe that will be enough to avoid my sad hole for another day. 

All I have to do now is remove that playlist from my Spotify library and text my girlfriend good night.

• depression
• drag path edits
• late night drives
• mental health
• mindfulness
• nostalgia
• reflection