nostalgia
February 28, 2025
“I’ve overheard your theory; nostalgia’s for geeks.”
The periods of greatest depression for me are always the periods with greatest nostalgia.
Maybe nostalgia is a symptom of depression. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m never nostalgic if not depressed, but when I’m depressed—which is most of my life—I’m sick with it. I even look back on my time at BYU with intense yearning and romance, the innocence—not so much an Edenic innocence, since shame dissipated with the acquisition of knowledge and not the other way around—but something else.
Whatever it was, I truly believed that a protective, patriarchal Force was watching over me and would reward me for being obedient. The promise of peace and protection is a complete lie, but I certainly understand the devotion to the concept via residual infantilism. Kind of like how I still fantasize about having a sugar daddy who pays all of my bills while I frolic in Elysian fields and take opulent bubble baths, even though I would never be comfortable being financially dependent on anyone, especially a man requiring sex from me. Lol.
Getting accepted into BYU as a Mormon child-bride felt like infallible proof of my intelligence and virtue. In certain terms I essentially accomplished the ideal in my realm of conservative, gendered, scrupulous worship: I was obedient, educated, married, living in Utah and attending “the Lord’s university.”
Now the size of the universe overwhelms me and fills me with grief. On some level a pagan, on some levels a cosmologist, no matter which highs of worship I’m able to experience—via chemicals, love, intimacy, fashion, food, encounters with Nature, etc.—there will always be infinitely greater experiences out of my reach that are essentially dead to me. Like L.M. Montgomery said, “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”
The films, books, textiles, landscapes, sensations, human relationships, and animal friendships I will never know take a greater hold on my heart than the joys of my current experience, as of late. With everything I have going on, all the death and all the stress, the way I feel isn’t alarming I guess, but I am resentful. I am beautiful, intelligent, and full of passion, and the heaviness of my grief and my fatigue, and the financial strain on my life are all shackling me to my bed.
To sum up my current state: a dead weight of skull on a black satin pillow, passing from one sleep to another.
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