Following the release of Lizzy McAlpine’s new single Older, TikTok users have quickly cultivated a heart-wrenchingly nostalgic trend. In these videos, a current photo of a daughter and mother is paired with an older photo of the duo, both much younger, placed over the lyrics “Over and over, watching it pass, Mom’s getting older, I’m wanting it back” from McAlpine’s song.
If your For You page is anything like mine, you haven’t been able to escape these videos. During each one, my heart opens up and absorbs all of the painful nostalgia like a dry sponge.
I have always been a nostalgic person, easily made emotional by the fleeting memories of how good childhood was in the early 2000s. I tear up at the thought of watching Saturday morning cartoons in my princess pajamas, listening to One Direction or Hannah Montana, and running around outside for hours, rarely getting tired.
But as I’ve dove into adulthood head first, these memories and deep feelings of nostalgia seem to follow me everywhere I go. Is everyone else in their 20s feeling this? I can’t help but wonder if this is a right of passage. And I fear these thoughts will only get worse with age.
It feels like grief. A strange, bittersweet and melancholic wave of grief that is inescapable. Yearning for places you can never experience again, moments you can never resume and at times it feels like you’re remembering people who don’t exist anymore. But they do, we are just grown up now.
None of my childhood homes belong to me anymore, and even if they did, even if I went back, no one would be there. My brothers and I live separate lives, and I often feel guilt for my busy life as a 20-year-old college student trying to stay afloat.
When I do get a second to breathe and reflect, I often spend hours going through sentimental photos, doing things to nurture my inner child, and wishing every day to be a little girl with no responsibilities and no clue as to how hard life is going to get.
While I don’t have much left from my childhood, I do have my memories; and for those I would trade nothing; except maybe getting one day to relive it. My mind is a steel trap; I remember everything. And even though it is hard sometimes when I can’t forget the bad, when I replay all those years of good, a piece of me heals.
I wish I could go visit my adolescent self who longed to grow up, and tell her that everyone who said these were the good years, and to not wish them away, were right. Although in the same thought, I know in 10 years I will be thinking the same thing of 20 year old me. I guess that’s just life.
All moments are precious, mortality is beautiful and simultaneously painful, but we deserve to cherish every version of ourselves. We never know when we will wish to go back.