When it feels good to feel sad.

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Hi, sweet friends. Welcome back to a whole lot of Not Complaining—your one-stop shop to indulge in conversations about life’s little disappointments, larger conundrums, and human heartbreaks… with a healthy dose of hope and humor mixed in along the way. I, for one, think that complaining is incredibly important. We all do it—so why not normalize how helpful it can be?

Today we’re exploring the topic of nostalgia and how sometimes it can feel oh so good to feel sad. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how often nostalgia creeps into my mind and heart. I struggle sometimes to sort through the difference between nostalgia and sadness. I know sadness can be felt in many forms, often without nostalgia. But I think it’s difficult to feel nostalgic without at least a twinge of sadness to accompany it. 

*I also want to add a small disclaimer about what I mean when I say “sad” or “sadness” in today’s newsletter. I’m a big believer in the power of therapy, medication, and treatment for anxiety and depression, and I highly encourage anyone to seek help or treatment if they are struggling with ongoing symptoms of depression. For the purpose of our chat today, when I talk about sadness, I’m referring specifically to the fleeting and changing feeling of being sad, and not the scientific and clinical definitions of depression.

Before we really jump in, I’ve made an almost ironic, semi-cheesy playlist for you to listen to while you read, if you’d like. I titled this playlist after a journal entry I wrote about nostalgia and sadness in the middle of the pandemic. "Wish You Were Here" is a combination of songs that remind me of a very specific moment or chapter of life. Each song gives me the type of bittersweet sadness that we’re talking about today. If you’re wanting to get into your feels, sit back and press play.

Here is the journal entry I wrote in August of 2020:

There’s a noticeable shift in the air now. The last smells of the height of summer wafted down the road somewhere and left us with chilled mornings and shorter days. A shift inside is noticeable, too. A reckoning of a new pace, a recounting of how I’ve spent my days since the first of February. A sadness when I run downstairs at my parents’ house, a smell that reminds me of an earlier chapter, a prequel to this story. It feels sometimes like we’re all holding our breath, hoping each headline will be the last of its kind and holding on for a time when we can see each other smile when we pass on the sidewalk. For now, just another day of this year — it will trick you into thinking it’s yesterday, shockingly similar with a few minor edits. The extra phone calls, messages, I love yous, I miss yous, another bottle of wine emptied. “Wish you were here” — me to everyone.

When I read back on the words I wrote nearly four years ago, I’m filled with an almost indescribable feeling (or combination of feelings). I believe this to be the silly little trickster we know as nostalgia, at work yet again. When you look up the meaning of the word “nostalgia,” it’s almost always described as: a wistful affection for the past, typically for a time or place with positive associations. However, what’s missing here is that the true origin of the word stems from the Greek words “Nostos” meaning to return home, and “Algos” meaning pain. Let’s all take a moment to let that sink in. Nostalgia, later defined in the mid-18th century to mean “acute homesickness,” actually refers to the pain of wanting to return home. I don’t know about you all, but that really resonates with me in a deeply knowing and understanding way. We’ve all come from somewhere, and if we’re lucky, we’ll continue on to many places in the future. But ultimately, there is a pain left behind within us that yearns for the places we’ve already been and the people we were with along the way. And it’s not that the modern-day definition of the word “nostalgia” is incorrect—it is an affection for the past. But perhaps it’s not just a positive association with a memory, but instead a fond remembering and painful longing to return home, to who we were before.

For the last month or so, nostalgia has been hitting hard. Like, not in a fun way. Do you ever go through old photos because you know it will probably make you cry? Or read past letters and notes from friends or family members because you just want to feel something? If you don’t, good for you. I personally enjoy a good cry, and I like to think it’s my way of processing all the crap we deal with on the reg. Some people train for triathlons or go to Barry’s Bootcamp… I sit on my living room floor reading old birthday cards from my friends and droning on to you all in this newsletter. Sue me. But lately, nostalgia has truly been overstaying its welcome. My brain has been flooded with non-stop longing to return to a time before. For example—lately, in the early mornings, I can’t stop thinking about the days I would wake up as a child in my grandma’s canary yellow guest bedroom, wrapped in floral sheets that smelled vaguely of laundry detergent and spearmint gum (and the cigarettes she enjoyed on the screened-in porch that she swore she didn’t smoke anymore). I would sleepily trot into her kitchen to find my mom slicing up sugary donuts into smaller pieces while my grandma filed her fingernails at the kitchen table. Such an odd memory, but one I can’t seem to stop conjuring up in my mind. When my sister was visiting Portland a few weeks ago, I asked her if she thought of this scene in my grandma's kitchen as often as I did… to which she laughed and simply replied, “no, I don’t think so.” So, naturally, I assumed something was wrong with me and asked my therapist.

As it turns out, our bodies want us to remember. The remembering is like a tug on our souls as we traverse the landscape of a world built on constant scrolling, consumerism, and social media psychological warfare (sorry, I love a good mind-numbing scroll as much as the next person, but it’s truly killing us). Like a roadmap of our entire lives and experiences, our physical bodies store and remember the important defining moments that shape where we are now. If you’ve read "The Body Keeps The Score," you know what I’m talking about. Surprisingly, my intense feelings of nostalgia and desire to bring on my own feelings of sadness did correspond with a big life event. Or rather, the anniversary of one. Last May, my life took a large, unexpected turn when my former partner and I decided to transition into friendship and go our separate ways romantically. Understandably, I thought that our newfound close friendship and personally being in a good place would make me immune to the emotions surrounding the one-year anniversary of our breakup. But I was quickly humbled by the intense dreams, strange déjà vu occurrences, and daily nostalgia I experienced all month long. What I’m trying to say is: if you’re trying hard not to remember something, your body will always find a way to remember for you until you’ve paid close enough attention to heal those parts of you. I think nostalgia shows up when we’re forgetting certain parts of ourselves and where we’ve come from, to call attention to the parts of us we may be intentionally or unintentionally forgetting.

As some of you may know, I recently took a solo road trip down (and back up) the Oregon and California coasts for about two weeks. The inspiration behind this very long and very beautiful independent exploration stemmed from a rough time at work and a feeling of stickiness in my day-to-day life. It seems when I’m not exactly sure what the near future holds, I can make the most sense of things by changing my immediate surroundings (i.e., leaving my house or, in this case, the state). I learned and saw so many things while on the road, but one of the most powerful 55+ minutes I had alone in my truck, whom I call Hal, was listening to an episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast about transforming sadness into power. If you’re one of my near and dear friends, you know that I talk about this podcast constantly. There is something about the way the hosts make me feel like I’m sitting on the floor of their living room with them, lamenting and relating about a vast range of confusing and, well, hard, things about life. If you’re not a listener, the hour-long episodes explore relatable topics like loneliness, setting boundaries, addiction, illness… you get the idea. It’s rare for me to miss an episode, and I always walk away from their conversations feeling compelled to write or call a friend.

Something important to know about me: I struggle with sticking to routines and general attentiveness. Call it neurodivergence, ADHD, or whatever you want, really. It shows up in my life in many ways (just ask my roommate how I love to start conversations while brushing my teeth)—but one tangible example is that I’ll be really into a routine that I know is good for me (like taking my supplements every night before bed), and then for inexplicable reasons, I’ll quit cold turkey. I don’t love the term “lazy”—I think it inherently implies that not doing something is bad. And let’s be honest, I think we could all do a whole lot less, in a culture obsessed with productivity and being busy. But I often wonder: if I’m not just being “lazy,” then what is the explanation for not doing something that I know is good for me? I know what my therapist would say: that in an age where constant stimulation is the norm, we not only deserve rest, but it is critical to our survival (blah blah). But, I think my iron-deficient body also deserves the iron supplement I’m depriving it of when I decide not to refill my weekly pillbox on Sunday night. This is all a very roundabout way of explaining to you that it’s sort of a miracle that I tune into this podcast every week. But this freaking podcast, man. I can focus so intently it’s like I’m waiting to find out if I won a million dollars or not. That’s how good it is, so give it a listen.

ANYWAY, The TLDR (mom, it means “too long didn’t read”), is that this episode on transforming sadness into power really hit me in the gut. They describe sadness as “a deep paying attention,” that many of us experience daily, or at least more frequently than others. This deep paying attention, while sometimes painful, can actually provide the most beautiful opportunity to better know and understand our true selves. And by paying deeper attention to these signals from our bodies and brains, we may be able to view these moments of sadness, nostalgia, etc., as incredibly powerful sources of information. And, in fact, with this important and powerful information, we may be able to more peacefully and truthfully move through the world. The root of most fear and anxiety stems from the not-knowing. The guessing about how we’ll feel, and what will happen. But perhaps we already have all of the information we need right now, we just aren’t paying close enough attention. Ah, what a relief.

The transition from spring into summer has always been a particularly sad/happy time for me. Something about the blooming, the heavy rains arriving on hot, dry concrete, and the moody weather on these longer days makes me feel all of the things. I’m hoping this newfound understanding of nostalgia and the corresponding good-kind-of-sadness will continue to provide a kind of understanding through it all. That maybe it will remind me that the secret place to find the good, juicy stuff in life is actually somewhere deep within. And it resides in there for you, too.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading or listening to a whole lot of Not Complaining.

Until next time,

C