The Value of Nostalgia for the Anxious

On Saturdays in high school, my dad and I would drive to the Krispy Kreme a few towns over. Our route took us near a leafy forest preserve where we often saw deer, down wide streets with tarred-over cracks in the asphalt, and past a barber shop called Off the Top, whose oversized O and P caused me to transpose the words and call it “Off to the P,” an expression my family still uses to this day to mean something weird. We would make it a point to arrive always while the HOT DONUTS NOW sign was lit, even though it meant me, a perpetually tired seventeen-year-old, waking up before nine on the weekend. Dad and I would sit across from each other, talking over a box of a dozen glazed donuts, ripping them in half and dunking them into our coffee.

Families with small children were often present, and when one of the bleary-eyed parents caught my dad’s eye, he would smile and point at me. “Someday, it will be like this,” he’d say, gesturing to the space between us. “It happens too fast.” Then we would put the remaining donuts in the backseat of the car, set our coffees in the cupholders, and drive home.

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Time only moves in one direction, but sometimes I imagine that, with sufficient willpower, I could bend it and go home again, for a little while. As a child, home was a protective layer between my anxious mind and the buffeting forces of the outside world. This was primarily due to my family, which was dominated by curiosity, cheer, and shared love of adventure. Maybe it’s horrible to say that your childhood was magical, but that is the word for those long afternoon drives on midwestern roads, the family dinners where we could answer history questions to earn a dollar, the Saturday morning donut runs that predated Krispy Kreme. Even the house itself was pleasant and comforting; I liked the symmetry of how it looked a little like me: pale white siding and a red roof.

In his essay “Proust Goes to the Country Club,” Willard Spiegelman names protagonists battling the same sort of nostalgia: Odysseus, the Biblical Ruth, classmates looking for meaning at their high school reunion. These were anxious people, beleaguered by uncertainty, in some version of the mundane predicament in which I find myself daily: wanting to go home again, knowing I can’t. “The past holds out, if not promise, at least the luxury of solace,” Spiegelman writes, “but only if that past was a happy one.” It was happy for me, and some days I long for a time machine to transport me back to my yellow childhood bedroom in the house on Eisenhower Circle, so I can fall asleep to the sound of my dad playing the piano downstairs.

Nostalgia, from the Greek “nostos,” to return home, and “algos,” pain, used to be a medical diagnosis. Is it shameful to return again and again to nostalgia, to depend on it to cope with one’s anxieties? It seems there are—there must be—healthier, more mature ways to deal with uncertainty than to wish for the past. And yet I pine, sometimes physically ache for it—for the feeling of being at home, a feeling that, as an adult, consistently eludes me no matter how much nesting or decorating or meditating I try to do.

A home can be comforting to a child in a way it can’t be to a grown adult, and a child can be cared for by her family in a way that a grown adult cannot. My parents and my siblings, all still very much a part of my life, will never live under the same roof again, and that is irretrievably sad to me. I am more than a little embarrassed by this sadness. It seems to me a sign that I have not yet properly grown up.

Now, I have an ambivalent relationship with my own home. I feel shaky in it, unsure of myself, vulnerable. I think this is because, as we age, our homes become an extension of ourselves. They no longer reflect the safety of proximate parents. The only perfume I smell is my own. My husband, who is stable and sane, still cannot comfort me the way my parents can, and that makes me feel there is something wrong with me. I feel toward my home like I feel about my own mind: sick of it, embittered, resentful.

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I was still anxious as a child, but at home I felt safe, like whatever anxiety I carried home from school would be shrugged off with my backpack in the mudroom. My prevailing memory of that time is a kind of buoyancy, a safety I don’t feel I experience now.

When chronically anxious people feel we lack control, we often believe our best efforts would be wasted on trying to fix our current situations, and so we do not try. We might blame others, or ourselves. We might become depressed. Trying anything new strikes us as futile, and so we sink into a kind of fearful torpor. We might imagine that all of this was easier when we were children, or teenagers, and wish ourselves backwards in time.

Still, nostalgia can be helpful, too. A 2010 study attempted to understand whether nostalgia might serve an “existential anxiety-buffering function.” The participants, mostly female psychology undergraduates at North Dakota State University, were given prompts to remind them of their own mortality and then rated according to their “nostalgia proneness.” Those who were more prone to nostalgia showed lower levels of death-related anxiety than those who were less prone to it, the report found.

I used to think nostalgia was only a sign of weakness; that I was engaging in immature behavior when I wished for home. Perhaps part of me still believes this, but I can see its benefits now. In remembering, we are often distracted, relieved, consoled. Nostalgia, which seems so delicate and ephemeral, does some of the heavy lifting for me when I am confronted with my own mortality.

When my sister and I were very young, our dad would read to us in our parents’ bed. We would sit one on either side of him, and this way we first heard The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia. Our favorite book, though, was a story of a family with twelve children called Cheaper by the Dozen. Dad, in the role of the father, would puff out his cheeks and widen his eyes as he read, often including apocryphal anecdotes to make sure we were paying attention (“And then Ernestine, mad at her siblings for scaring her boyfriend away, sat in the corner and started to urinate copiously in anger”). We would giggle and urge him back to the book, and he would return to it until the chapter was finished or until we started to doze off, and then he would tuck us into our trundle beds like small mummies. As he departed, he always issued a stern admonition against any kind of “sister talk.” We would whisper and giggle again, and he would pretend to go into a rage and tickle us until our stomachs were sore from laughing, and then we would fall asleep.

Earlier this summer, my sister and I were driving to meet our parents for lunch. I texted with our ETA, and Dad wrote back: “Drive safely, you chipmunks. We’ll be there! No sister talk on the way down!” Time bends and folds through space. My sister and I laughed, still next to each other, still on our way together, full of remembering. It happened too fast.

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