you can make new memories
My friends were annoyed and I could tell.
But I continued to hesitate.
For better or for worse, we’ve all been inadvertently transported back in time—maybe it's a smell, a song, the way you walk through the entrance of the bar you frequented in college hundreds of times—but you’ve graduated, you find yourself gripped by a powerful and disorienting déjà vu.
For a long time I sought out the feeling of nostalgia, like the main character in the rising action of the movie whose storyline is finally becoming more clear as we piece together how they got here through snippets of their past.
I'd watch a compilation of memories playing on the big screen of my mind over and over again like a comfort film.
This type of thinking, this certain kind of accessible sadness, was like a drug I could keep taking hit after hit of with seemingly minimal repercussions.
I’d play the songs and drive through my hometown singing to them out loud, enchanted with hypothesizing about people and places that were no longer part of my life.
I engaged in this behavior for longer than I’d like to admit. And I know that it must have been serving some type of purpose even if deep down I knew it wasn’t serving me.
Maybe it was to feel validated, like I was important, like I wasn’t on my own
Maybe it was to feel like I wasn’t already past the excitement of youth and firsts and everything feeling magic and new
Maybe it was to suppress a fear of being alone forever, or a doubt that I was capable of feeling the feelings of giddy excitement becoming heartbreak and loss all over again
Maybe it was to avoid having to put myself out there and remain in the comfort of what was and what could have been because it felt safer than any new opportunities and vulnerabilities
We can’t live in the past, but we can live in our heads.
We’ll make new memories.
my friend said to me this afternoon
A simple declaration with profound implications.
It’s taken me this long to realize:
if I’m too busy trying to live back there, how am I ever going to be present enough to make new memories here?
It wasn’t that these old experiences I’d been reliving were so prominent to my character development that I couldn’t escape them, it is that I had been choosing to replay them over and over.
And just like that, I can choose to make new memories.
Whether its one particular song, an artist, or an entire music festival, I just want to relay that you can choose to make new memories the moment you decide you’re ready for it. The moment you decide to stop rewinding and rewatching and choose to hit record in this moment right now.
A moment apart, a new memory.
Those old films can reside on your shelves as long as you like, but one day you might find you’ve outgrown them entirely.
It’s nice knowing they’re there to have but you don’t watch them anymore.
You finally understand that no matter how many times you’ve watched them their ending isn’t going to be different.
But they got you here, and here is pretty great.
