Nobody Warned Me About This Part

When remembering becomes your full-time personality... on rewatching your favorite shows over and over again, Covid-19 bedroom, and friendship breakups.

When you Google the word nostalgia, one word in the definition stands out: bittersweet.

“Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotional experience—a sentimental longing for the past, often triggered by sensory inputs like music, scents, or familiar items.” (Google, 2026) 

We all do this. 

We scroll through our camera rolls in a guilty-pleasure haze or sit with old friends,

 rehashing the “good old days.”

 There is a quiet comfort in that feeling, especially in a world that feels so uncertain. 

Nostalgia is about balance.

 Lean too far into it, and it can become a kind of self-harm, not in a dramatic way, but in an unintentional one. 

You stop moving forward. You stay attached to a version of yourself that no longer exists. You often wish a certain friend group had stayed together, or that you were still at a certain stage of life you wish you could get back to.  

But, when handled well, though, nostalgia can be a gift—a way of honoring where you have been without letting it hold you hostage.

Packaged neatly in a bow wrapped with a series of episodes of your favorite show running over and over again. 

But when the line starts to blur.

It is a subtle kind of self-sabotage. Not cinematic or obvious. More like replaying old versions of yourself, like voice notes you refuse to delete, even when they no longer fit your life.

Within the last year, I have graduated from college, moved back to Michigan from Colorado, published a book, given speeches, made products, and the list goes on.—things I once wished for and worked so hard for.

And still, I catch myself doom-scrolling past TikToks I made in college as they belong to someone else wearing my clothes. Or worse, like they belong to a version of me I am supposed to get back to.

I remember older girls on TikTok telling me to record everything, to capture these moments because one day I would miss them.

But no one really talks about when it becomes too much.  When documenting your life turns into rewatching it.  When remembering starts to replace living.

At what point does nostalgia stop being a memory  and start becoming a place you hide?

COVID is a bedroom of nostalgia 

One of those places we can go is our bedrooms. Dark comfy corners, your body melting into the sheets. And a weighted blanket and our phone to keep us company. 

COVID was one of those times when our bedrooms were our comfort, a place of nostalgia, finding comfort in the What-could-have-beens in life or in a loop of your camera roll. 

At its best, nostalgia is kind of beautiful. It's evidence that something counted, even if it can't anymore. COVID just made the whole feeling weirder to sit with when moments weren’t happening.

Prom. College. Homecomings. Football games. Concerts. 

Crucial degenerate years. Many people say that these years were taken from Generation Z, but it only deepened my understanding of why making moments with others matter. 

Oh, and trust me, I still had my fun. 

Usually, nostalgia is private. 

But everyone on Earth at that time experienced the same rupture simultaneously. Hence, this nostalgia became strangely communal — and also strangely hard to articulate, because everyone's loss looked different, even within the same shared event.

This is shared: the unspoken experience of mentally freezing in a certain place during that time—like everyone got paused mid-life and then hit play again a few years later, expected just to continue. 

This feeling still shifted. Not just routines, but internal timelines. Some people are still emotionally in that same room they were sitting in during lockdown. 

Others are chasing versions of themselves they thought they’d become in 2020, like they’re still catching up to an old forecast of who they were supposed to be. 

It is weird sometimes, I think I am still seventeen, applying to my dream school in Colorado, hoping one day life will make a little bit more sense. Yet now, I am twenty-three, an author, and still don’t know what is going on. 

It makes nostalgia even more confusing, because it’s not just “missing the past.” It’s sometimes not even realizing what part of you is the past anymore.

Friendship breakups are the hardest of all breakups 

Sometimes, when I feel nostalgic, I can go into a deep rhythm of what I am missing.  I often wonder why things can’t stay the same. In the chaos of my own life. 

There are feelings I wish could last forever, and moments that make me want to reach out to a friend—just to share them with someone who understands.

Life keeps getting more confusing as the years pile up. 

Friendships really do make the world feel like it’s holding together. And yet… one unfortunate, disappointing thing always happens: life.

People move away. They go to college. They choose partners. They get busy. They become different versions of themselves. And there’s not always a dramatic reason for it—no big fight, no clear ending, no “we’re not friends anymore” moment—just distance.

Trust me, I’ve had moments where it felt like I was on the verge of a breakup with my best friend just because she was moving a couple of hours away. 

No conflict, no sides to take—just life doing what it does. And suddenly you’re grieving someone who is still very much alive, just not as close as they used to be.

That’s the part no one really prepares you for: how normal it is for friendships to change without anything going wrong.

They just… shift. Quietly. Over time. Until one day you realize you’re not in the same chapter anymore.

Friends get married at different times. Get promoted. Also, make decisions that you do not agree with. 

And sometimes, it makes you wonder, " Am I in the right spot?”

I guess that is your twenties, you never know if you are in the right spot. Maybe you never will. 

It does make me wonder if there's any way we can control this feeling?

In a perfect world, we all live on a huge commune and raise our babies together. And we never leave our friends, and nothing ever changes. 

But we, in the end, don't evolve that way as humans, and I truly believe what is waiting for us is behind the next door. And I can watch the videos I made in high school, and still admire the friends I don't often see anymore for that time in my life. 

Everything you do leads to the next package gift, and nostalgia is the bittersweet moment that reminds you where you are and stays present. 

Why We Still Use Film Cameras

I know I am not the only one who has noticed that everyone in 2026 is shooting on film cameras rather than on their iPhones and using CDs instead of Spotify. Handwriting letters. Buying vinyl and showing up to things.

It might be performative. Maybe. A kind of costume in a world full of copies, a way of signaling I am different while doing the same thing as everyone else who wants to seem different. I get the skepticism.

But I don't think that's all it is.

There's something underneath the aesthetic — a quiet, almost desperate need to slow down the receiving of things. To hold something that takes time. In an era where we get music, information, validation, and dinner delivered at the same speed, people are reaching for objects that push back. That makes you wait. That asks something of you before they give anything back.

A film camera gives you 24 shots and no preview. You don't know what you got until later — sometimes weeks later. And somehow, that delay makes the image mean more. You were present for it because you had to be.

That's not nostalgia for a decade. That's nostalgia for a feeling — the feeling of things mattering because they cost something.

Personally, I have always been a child of the seventies, despite being born several decades too late. Raised by parents who had their best years in that era, I grew up with disco energy running through me before I even had words for it. Part influence, partly just born with it — as I came pre-loaded with a fondness for things I'd never actually experienced.

My parents introduced me to Full House, Charles in Charge, Punky Brewster, and The Brady Bunch. I was absorbing the emotional texture of eras I had missed entirely, watching moments from a secondary vantage point, feeling a longing for something I had never lost.

Which raises a strange question: can you be nostalgic for a time you never lived in?

I think you can. And I think what you're actually missing isn't the decade — it's the quality of that era. The slowness. The analog warmth. The sense that a Saturday afternoon could just be a Saturday afternoon, with nowhere to document it going.

As I got older, I stopped saying I was "born in the wrong decade" — that framing always felt a little like opting out of your own life. But I held onto the spirit of it: a belief that older things were made with a different kind of care, and that some of that care is worth bringing forward.

So when I see someone at a concert holding up a disposable camera instead of an iPhone, I don't roll my eyes. I recognize the impulse. They're not pretending to live in 1974. They're trying to feel the weight of the moment — to make it cost something, so they'll know it was real.

That's what nostalgia, at its best, actually does.

It's not about going back. It's about remembering what it felt like to be somewhere fully — and trying, in whatever small and sometimes silly way, to feel that again.

I have rewatched Glee and Gilmore Girls way too many times. Is that a problem?

When you have these aching feelings, one way to relieve them is to watch your favorite show. Maybe once, maybe twice. Or the whole series, too. Or five times. We're not counting.

There are thousands, millions, billions of things to watch, but why do we return to the same show?

For me, Glee makes complete sense. 

I grew up around musical theatre and embracing creativity. 

Gilmore Girls, though? That one I cannot fully explain. I just want to live in Stars Hollow and drink an alarming amount of coffee. 

The point is, we go back—every time.

This isn't new behavior either. It didn't start with streaming or even DVD box sets, which people definitely didn't beg their parents for.

Since the beginning of television, networks understood something quietly profound about human nature: people don't just want something new. 

They want something familiar. Reruns were actually born out of necessity — in the 1950s, Lucille Ball's pregnancy forced the network behind I Love Lucy to re-air old episodes. What they discovered was that audiences didn't mind at all. They came back anyway. Happily.

One accidental scheduling decision basically invented therapeutic nostalgia as a television strategy. Lucille Ball accidentally invented the comfort rewatch. Truly an icon on every level.

And here we are, seventy years later, doing the same thing — just with better resolution and considerably worse sleep schedules.

So no. Rewatching Glee for the fifth time is not a problem. It is a coping mechanism with a rich historical tradition. 

Basically self-care. You're welcome.

The Bittersweet Part

I am twenty-three years old. I have a book with my name on it, a Michigan zip code I didn't plan on, and a camera roll full of a girl I am still trying to catch up to.

And somehow, I still don't really know what I'm doing.

But I think that's actually the whole point nostalgia has been trying to make this entire time — not that the past was better, but that it was real. The prom that didn't happen. The friends who drifted without a fight. The college apartment, the Tuesday dances, the film photos that took three weeks to develop. The Glee rewatch at 2 am. The CD is playing in a world that has no reason to have CDs still.

All of it counted. Even the parts that hurt. Even the years that got swallowed whole.

Nostalgia isn't telling you to go back. It never was. It's just the feeling you get when you realize you were actually there — present enough, alive enough, to make something worth missing.

So keep the videos you'll never delete. Rewatch the show. Hold onto the friendships even as they change shape. Shoot on film. Miss people out loud.

Just don't let the missing become the whole story.

Because what's waiting behind the next door — your next chapter, your next version, the moments you haven't made yet — that's going to be worth missing too.