Hello, it's your memories
Nostalgia fall (because nos-fall-gia sounds... wrong)
I’m not sure if you’ve realized this, but it’s already mid-September. I’m back in Anchorage and the leaves on the tree outside are that precious brittle florescent yellow: electric last gasps at life. The color reminds me of the energy surge I tend to get right before falling ill, when my body is in overdrive preparing for attack. I remember first noticing this pattern one weekend in the winter of my sophomore year of high school. There was a party on a Friday night and I remember feeling euphoric, animated, charming in a social space that would usually make me anxious. I remember I stayed out way layer than normal and didn’t want to go to bed. I felt like the best version of myself.
The next morning I woke up with a sore throat and headache, the full flu experience. It was false energy! I remember thinking, about my mood the night before. I was duped by my body; I wasn’t just finally living my best party life but instead had been fighting an invisible virus. Maybe that’s why I’m still skeptical of feeling too good—I somehow don’t trust it.
Fall is a time of remembrance, of reflection. Taking stock of summer’s chaos, re-centering in preparation for winter.
I say this as if its universal — is it? I’m still reeling from the fact that apparently a lot of people hate August (yes, the month). Growing up on the east coast, August was my favorite part of summer. The season had finally settled into itself; you knew exactly what clothes to wear, the thunderstorms were over and the sunsets earlier and even more orange. The ocean was warm and the crickets chirped. The air seemed to buzz, it would wrap you up but not suffocate you like the heat waves of July. But I haven’t spent a full August on the east coast in years now. What do I know? I’m just being nostalgic.
In Anchorage, August is different. It’s a good time to travel elsewhere; generally it’s rainy and a bit too cool, and people get depressed that summer’s over. It feels jarring to go from hot sunny May-July and then wear wool sweaters before Labor Day. So when I talk about August, I’m talking about east coast August. The last days of summer, the precursor to fall. The best time of the year.
The internet’s “hating August” thing threw me. It reminded me of an old fear that I’m unknowingly attracted to endings; to decay. That I’m always too late to a party, a life phase, a trend. That by the time I’m ready for something it’s already over, just like by the time I’m fully feeling summer it’s already August, and everyone else is excited for fall.
I’ve largely abandoned that fear now, and find it a bit egotistical. I am not some great harbinger of doom. Instead, I keep thinking of the phrase I read somewhere that “you can’t be late to your own life.” So what if I like August, endings, arriving after others have already paved the way? So what if I’m a late bloomer sometimes. There’s no timetable but my own (metaphorically speaking, at least). I’ll get there when I get there and, as we know, there is no there there so the journey is all that is. The only constant in life is change. Love thy neighbor. Forgive not my trespasses… okay this has gone from repeating platitudes to remembering the two things I learned long ago in Sunday school. I think you get the idea. Photo interlude?
My nostalgia has lessened with age. I recently came across some journal entries from the past few Septembers that read along the lines of, “nostalgia: I don’t feel it so strongly anymore” and “I had a feeling earlier that I’m no longer nostalgic… I think that’s a good thing.”1
Rereading those entries, it strikes me that they’re basically my expressing nostalgia for my former nostalgia, which is wild. Safe to say that this time of year still brings me to reflect. Nostalgia: I’ve still got it.[TM]
I’m nearly positive that “nostalgia fall” is not another “August” situation, meaning it does seem like a well-shared cultural phenomenon. I know it runs in my family at least: I remember getting an email from my dad during my first semester of college in which he expressed how the changing leaves make him reflect on his life, loss, and the passage of time. I guess that’s literally what happens in fall—we watch, often beautifully, as plants and trees decay, wither, and die. How can you not wonder about your own endings?
This feels like a dumb, i.e. obvious, post. Of course fall is a time for reflection. This isn’t a controversy (unlike provocative, controversial August!).
Truthfully, it’s been hard to get back into the swing of writing after a few weeks away. As much as I love to return, being back in old places is dysregulating. I’ve often joked about wanting to be “bi-coastal”—the coasts, in this fantasy, would be whatever we call the area around Anchorage and my childhood home of New York.
In that vein, I’ve recently become fascinated by a British influencer who is splitting her time between London and New York (must be nice…). She posts YouTube videos about her experiences (and her outfits, of course) and, when watching one this week, my nostalgia returned in full force. In the video, she’s walking around New York on a spring evening. Something about the buildings, the sky, the feeling of promise standing on a street corner in downtown Manhattan reminded me of so many times when I felt young and hopeful, standing on street corners beneath a twilit sky. The video clip transported me to my first year of law school, living in a new part of the city with new doors open, new social worlds unfolding. But also to those years after college when everything was a blur and no one knew what we were doing except hanging out in cramped apartments and crowded bars and complaining about our first real jobs and how old we were. Babies, all of us.
Ah yes, nostalgia.
Addendum: I don’t actually want to be bi-coastal
To anyone concerned, I adore Anchorage and am thrilled to choose it as my home. The idea of feeling split between two places overwhelms me; I like constancy and am enjoying this phase of nesting. If nostalgia has taught me anything, it’s that there will always be other possible lives. The multiverse of our experiences.
I used to feel that having nostalgia meant I had done something wrong;2 that wanting something I didn’t have, or yearning for past times, meant I’d erred in how I was living. And perhaps at one point that felt true—over the past decade I’ve made big changes to align my life with my concept of self. As a paralegal in the height of the “what am I doing” phase I remember taping Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” to my cubicle wall. I would sit and read the poem and be struck by the last line, a hard truth about things I knew I had to do in order to figure out who I was, who I want to be. That I needed to stop hiding from myself.
It’s funny, I’m nostalgic even for that confused paralegal time. I don’t want to repeat it—I think a lot of people in our 30s share some gratitude for feeling more stable, more sure of ourselves now. In comparison, the chaos of my 20s seems exhausting. But the pull is there, the beauty of so-called lost time to play and experiment and discover who you are. I’m sure I will always be nostalgic for my past selves. I’m sure I’ll be nostalgic for this very moment, for time spent writing this newsletter, soon enough.
Again, the mantra that it’s impossible to be late to your own life saves me. That, and practicing “radical acceptance” of what is. I think when I wrote last year about no longer having nostalgia, what I meant was that I no longer fear I’ve made a wrong move in my life when I have moments of yearning for past times, of reveling in memory. My nostalgia is no longer tinged with anxiety or regret. I love my life, all of it. Cheers to the season that allows for this reflection so readily. Hope you can indulge in it as you wish.3
-Julia
Yeah, my journals are inspired. What brilliance.
Inherited Catholic guilt, is that you?
Even if that includes a pumpkin spice latte… wow, to think I almost completed a whole post about fall without mentioning pumpkin spice lattes. I was this close!
I, too, enjoy August. I enjoy every month of summer.
What you call nostalgia at this time of year has much to do with the falling leaves indeed. Autumn is an ending. The fields are cleared, the harvest is over, the leaves turn colors and fall, and life goes dormant. Dormancy is a kind of death. In the Jewish and Celtic traditions, autumn is the end of the year. The Jewish high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are times of reflection as the new year begins and we atone for the year past. This time of reflection is basically genetic. To come to an end and not reflect or feel nostalgic is to be entirely shut off from our nature and from nature itself.
Ah, but to feel this and not feel regret - this is better than good, this is what we all hope for. A life well lived.
Rilke is one of my favorite poets, but amazingly, I wasn't familiar with this poem. Thank you. And perhaps you know T.S. Eliot's poem, Little Gidding? Also a favorite, with a line that has instructed my life for decades: "To make a beginning is to make an end. The end is where we start from."
Cheers to this season!