I miss the old days. I miss lots of things in my life, I’ve always tend to be a nostalgic. It’s not new, it has always been, but that’s not always for the best. Spending too much time rewinding the past, being too self-aware about anything that happened, anything I said, how I should have handled things, is hard and uncomfortable. It’s hard to break the cycle though. It’s also uncomfortable, working on breaking a pattern.
I don’t know (yet) where it comes from, but that fear or forgetting things, events, people and voices has always been there. So, relying on that nostalgia is a great way for me to revisit my memories on a regular basis, like a general visiting his troops, checking that everything is at the right place. But the fact is that I often forget moments, or some memories are blurring. Also, I know that some of them are kept alive only because we talk a lot about them, and that’s the story told that I re-created, instead of really remembering. Is that clear ? Is that crazy ?
All of the memories from as young as possible to maybe 13, are some of the blurriest, yet the hardest sometimes. I learned a lot, as everyone, about me as an individual and about the way we, as kids, already learn to function as an ersatz of society. I’ve been happy, I had friends, I discovered what will then be a 15-year passion (horse-riding), but I also discovered cruel & narrow-minded people. That has shaped me, for sure. Around that age of 13, I realized that what brushed the others, stabbed me. That was an epiphany, a hard one to accept.
I miss being 14, thinking I knew what it was to love someone, and to be loved. What a fool. I miss being 15 and thinking that 20 will be the end of youth, that I will have my life put together until then. I miss being 16 and sharing so many sad songs & quotes to cope with the teenage years ; it felt so inspirational, that was amazing. I miss being 17, eager to be older, to experience freedom on another level. I miss being 18, although I learned the hard way how maintaining friendship is hard work, and how I didn’t know how to do it. I still don’t, in some ways.
I’m not really missing being 19 to 24, I think. I’ve loved, a lot, I had fun, I enjoyed new friends and grieved some old ones. But I also often felt I wasn’t loved for who I was. I lost people, eternally, or just by letting some of them go. I discovered that leaving school and working does not mean that you’re an adult. I took care of myself, consciously, maybe for the first time. Some of my certitudes were shattered. I’ve taken difficult decisions, I left people and I left jobs, hoping I made the right choices, answering the right opportunities. All of that seems like a mess when looking back. But I got through it. At 32, I can say that my twenties were here to help me find myself, but that wasn’t the funniest ride.
I miss being 25, discovering that you can love again after thinking that it’ll never happen again, how can this happen more than once in a life ? That was eye-opening, an amazing realization. I miss the freedom I created for myself at that age, enjoying, truly enjoying being alone, and not waiting for my boyfriend to make me happy. He made me happy too, by the way, but I didn’t let my happiness to rely only on him. I discovered, at 25, that I should do it for myself, first, and I took this under my own accountability, first. That was another epiphany.
After that, I don’t know how to explain feelings about the 25 to now, 32. That seems too fresh, too close, and at the same time, so many things happened. Adulthood came to the door, the real one, in the whole cliché maybe. Buying a car, buying a house, doing renovations, having a demanding job, a wedding, starting a family. All of this was a lot of work, and still is, and will always be. I may miss the fact that I won’t ever be able to be irresponsible for one day in my life. A small soul depends on me now, on us, and that’s a new reality. That was the hardest truth to digest.
I miss the old days, but life goes on, and I can’t wait for the new ones.