Digital Nostalgia

I've been watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A favorite anime of mine from when I was a teenager. And I got in so deep this time that I actually decided to read The Catcher in the Rye! 😆 And also, The Laughing Man short story, which I remember reading on some website as a teenager. Back when the internet was a place to explore, escape, and create for me.

It's funny. Like many, I used the internet to escape the anxiety and isolation I felt in "real life". And now... well, I don't have much of a real life. But the internet, or a lot of it, can feel just as anxiety inducing now. I still love the connection it allows, because my best friends are mostly far away, and I wouldn't even have met some of them otherwise. But it really isn't an escape the way it was before.

Just the opening of Stand Alone Complex gives me an odd kind of nostalgia. Maybe nostalgia is always meant to be bittersweet, but my two years of high school are almost dreamlike to me now. So real, compared to the half-life I've lived since, I feel I could simply blink and be back there. And yet, it's so blurry compared to the nine years of school that led up to it. The years I've revisited events of again and again, like a folktale. An origin story that led to nothing past the age of sixteen. (Did I actually die then? Am I just haunting my memories every time I dream?)

I've been finding myself drawn to writing stories about my sims again lately. It's nice, just writing as I go. Free to create away from the pressures of novel writing. Another thing I love that turned from escape into anxiety over time. But I guess I always find ways to make writing fresh and fun again. Eventually.

I know I'm not the only one feeling like this. If anything, I am constantly seeing people talk about nostalgia these days. A yearning for the past. But for me, it's complicated. When people talk about missing their childhood and teenage years, I can't really say that I agree. I was bullied so badly in school that I nearly didn't survive. But I do miss things from the past. Mostly, the ability to feel like there was an on/off switch for the chaos.