We're Gonna Miss Some of This, Weirdly Enough
Nostalgia is a curious thing in that it can make us look back with great longing at times in our lives that we know damn well were absolutely miserable.
My childhood and adolescence were Dickensian. I wrote a damn book about how colorfully traumatic it was growing up in a group home with an absent mother and a sick father in 2009’s The Big Rewind.
Yet I nevertheless find myself overcome with nostalgia towards elements of my childhood all the same, whether in the form of video games, music, movies or other entertainment that gave me joy and pleasure at a time in my life when I was generally overcome with misery, loneliness and despair.
In that respect I’m not nostalgic for the misery of my upbringing but rather the forms of escape that allowed me to lose myself in worlds that I found infinitely more comforting and kind than brutal reality.
I’m nostalgic for the pop culture of my youth because even when it was absolutely dreadful, as in the case of Saved by the Bell, that dreadfulness was still preferable to what was going in my life in terms of school or sports or girls.
When I saw all of the recent articles and social media posts noting for posterity that humanity has been in lockdown pandemic mode for a solid year thanks to COVID 19 my first response was that a year is a very long time, and that it sure as shit feels like an eternity since the pre-pandemic days.
Then I thought about how when COVID 19 is finally over and we can go back to living the way we did before, without having to foreground safety and survival above pretty much all other concerns, I would find myself in the curious position of missing the lockdown days.
That might seem odd. I fucking hate that I can’t go into a restaurant and eat a bowl of chili for fear of getting sick and dying. I hate that I haven’t been in a movie theater in over a year. I hate that it’s been so long since I’ve seen my dad in his nursing home in Morton Grove, Illinois. I hate that my exceedingly social and outgoing six year old can’t hang out with his friends and that his childhood, and the childhood of his two year old brother, have been irrevocably shaped and molded by COVID 19. I hate that so many people have died and so many people have gotten sick. I hate that this crisis seems to have pulled us even further apart rather than brought us together.
There are a lot of things that I have hated about COVID 19 and continue to hate. But there are also elements that I don’t mind at all. As someone who wrestles with a perpetual fear of missing out I appreciate that since nothing’s going on now, or has gone on for the past year, I am not missing out on anything.
As an introvert with intense social anxiety and paralyzing self-awareness/self-consciousness, I sure don’t mind having a damn good excuse to not go out, ever, to stay in and work on things that are important to me and spend time with my family.
From a professional standpoint, I’m proud that I was able to finish writing the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of The Weird Accordion to Al even as the world was falling apart.
Hell, for a while there I somehow managed to be more productive and prolific than usual despite COVID 19, although like everyone I eventually hit a wall, hard, and this website in particular has been struggling terribly over the past six to eight months or so.
The pandemic is lonely. It’s so goddamn lonely. But us lifelong loners and depressives are uniquely gifted at finding the solace and weird comfort in being alone, either by choice or necessity.
As with my childhood, I will not miss the many legitimately terrible aspects of COVID 19, but I will definitely miss some of it, and I suspect that might be true of y’all as well. If nothing else it was unique, albeit uniquely awful in so many ways.
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