Nostalgia is a tie-dyed emotion

Joy and fear, and the safe harbor where we meet our parts.

A few nights ago, my mom and I watched the sunset from the tiny public beach in a town where I spent the first 18 years of my life.

I grew up on Cape Cod, but my parents no longer live there, so my mom thought it would be fun to rent a space she found on VRBO that’s actually an antique train station converted into a modern residence made to look like it’s from a prior era. It’s across the street from the shop I scooped ice cream in high school, about a mile from our old house. I hadn’t been back in 18 years so as you can imagine, the nostalgia was visceral. And yet, it’s quite a different experience spending a week in a town as a tourist as an adult versus spending your childhood in the same town. The experience reminded me that nostalgia hits as a confluence of our inner parts as they battle for a cohesive emotional narrative and fail to find it. Nostalgia doesn’t happen with a smile nor a frown, but with a soft and distant gaze.

With five days off of work, I spent leisurely mornings drinking coffee in an Adirondack chair overlooking the ocean, going for long walks or jogs along the once-familiar streets of my childhood, and swimming in the eerily warm waters. One morning, I brought my towel down to a grassy park next to a playground and did some yoga, then sat for a while watching bumble bees feeding on white clover as humidity collected on my skin and the waters of Buzzards Bay gently lapped onto shore nearby. I also successfully spent the week sans social media; deleting the apps from my phone beforehand in an effort to be present.

It was a valiant effort, but in spite of it I found new compulsive ways of feeding into my fears and anxieties. By that I mean that my Instagram habit was replaced squarely by a frustrating new one: checking the Zillow app. And being back on my childhood home turf allowed me to easily sense the stark connection to such old and hardwired obsessive compulsions.

There I was, jogging down my old street, peering like an absolute creep at the house I grew up, keenly aware of the window of the bedroom where I downloaded my first micronutrient calculator and installed it on personal computer at the age of 13. Every night I would sit down and track what I ate that day on the computer, watching the numbers tally to summarize the emotions that I was allowed to feel—always seeking safety. Over time, I developed an extreme skill for estimating the caloric content of food. Below a certain number, and I was safe. This was before the days when calorie counts were regularly printed on menus and we carried around smartphones with calorie trackers in our pockets. I couldn’t control many things, like the changes happening to my body or the loss of my grandmother or the grief and distance that it sent my own parent into, but I could control those numbers, and over time the calculations were committed to memory, until I didn’t see flavors and textures but simply numbers on a plate.

It’s eery but powerful to realize that despite having healed from these self-destructive habits, there are parts of me that still operate in this way: as I pass each house my mind scans to the value and the reality of what this means for my financial future. In these moments, it’s not natural for me to look around and see a quaint saltbox or a cute cottage or a green house or a yellow house, I simply see price tags and missed-out equity. Probably one of the most salient emotions I had when I was in the throes of my eating disorder — other than fear — was jealousy. But I wasn’t jealous of how people looked, I was jealous of anyone who could sit down and just eat a plate of food normally as though it wasn’t a rote and terrifying exercise in calculations. I wanted that ecstasy of enjoyment and pleasure more than anything and it was one of the greatest gifts I got back from healing. Yet, now I find myself in the strangely nostalgic position of feeling this way again from time to time, only it’s not inside restaurants or kitchens…but as I walk down the street. I am jealous of those who can simply…see a house.

The good news is that I am in a very different place than I was at 13 or 21 or even 30. I have a deeper awareness of my own agency, and I have a more expansive set of tools at my disposal — thank goodness. One of these tools I’m fairly new to working with but it’s proved to be extremely helpful so far (dare I say, magical feeling) and that has been to journal with my internal parts. This essay is not going to be vast enough to explore this practice and perhaps you’re already familiar but if you’re interested in the topic my best recommendation would be to read Dr. Richard Schwartz’ No Bad Parts which is incredibly practical and in my opinion the best starting point.

I was aware of the concept of internal family systems and parts work for several years before I had my own eye-opening practical experience with it within the last year. At the beginning I struggled with it because I kept saying, “But seriously who are the parts, REALLY? Like are the parts little me’s? Are they me at different ages? Are they supposed to be represented by characters (like on Inside Out)?” And that spun me around for a while because it was sort of besides the point and it also made it feel like the parts were lesser-than’s or naive representations of me, and that made it hard to work with them. (By the way, I’ve heard some people describe parts work like you are the kindergarten teacher and all the parts are the young students but I feel like this metaphor falls flat for me because it creates a power hierarchy where there isn’t one. But if that metaphor works for you obviously take it and run with it.)

Eventually I had a breakthrough and started to respect, appreciate and be genuinely interested in the different parts of myself as complete equals, and then I felt like I could learn more about myself as it created a line of exchange internally that felt trusting. I also just love the idea of being internally complex and any practice that validates this complexity is soothing to me. So after I went on that jog and it brought back the nostalgic scary brain stuff where the houses felt like food used to feel, I kind of was like, “Oh, SHIT,” so I went back to the train station (lol) and pulled out my journal and decided to dig into conversation…with myself.

And really, it’s a work in progress! But what I will say is that the exercise made me a lot more aware of the complexity of the parts at play. So, usually what I’ll do if I’m coming up against let’s say some anxiety is that I’ll write down every part of me that wants to be heard or understood. So here’s what I wrote down:

When I find myself spinning out, spending hours on Zillow, feeling addicted, obsessive and consumed, what parts are present?

And this is what I wrote down:

• Part that feels like I made a mistake

• Part that worries I’m behind

• Part that worries I won’t find a home

• Part that worries I will be stuck

• Part that worries I won’t fulfill my dreams

• Part that’s jealous of home owners

• Part that wants the numbers to feel tidy and in my control

In that particular session I felt most drawn to the last part on that list so I asked some questions, got some answers, provided some updates, and eventually kind of ended it by thanking that part and letting it know we’ll talk again soon.

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On my flight home, I decided I’d risk sobbing my eyes out in front of strangers and watched the movie Inside Out. (I’ve written about this Pixar film before, and here I am doing it again. It’s probably in my top five favorite movies of all time.) If you haven’t seen it, there’s this part in the film where the main character, 11-year-old Riley’s internal emotion character, Sad, touches a core memory that was previously marked as a Joy memory. The tiny brilliant globe representing the memory shifts from orange to blue, Sad gloomily apologizing as Joy scrambles to protect every possible memory from being tainted by Sad’s fingertips.

Turning those social media trolls 'Inside Out'

Watching it again, I couldn’t help reflecting how seriously accurate that visual is. When I was a little kid, one of my favorite foods to order out at restaurants was clam chowder. I would get it almost every time we went to a seafood restaurant (along with a Shirley temple). Clam chowder was 100% a yellow Joy memory for me. But once I hit about Riley’s age, rather than feel joy when I’d see clam chowder on a menu, I would feel Fear. That memory, along with many others of similarly “bad” foods that would tip the numbers into the “unsafe” zone, changed colors to become little green glowing globes. So many of my food memories were tinged in this way from joy over to fear.

One afternoon while on the Cape, my mom and I got lunch at a restaurant that’s been a staple of the area for 60 years, originally opened aboard a railroad barge and still featuring the same plank flooring — now serving locals and tourists alike who indulge in $55 lobster rolls while overlooking a picturesque marina. With nostalgic anticipation, I ordered the clam chowder. I’m the kind of person who will only eat certain seafood in certain locations and so it had been years since I had it. It was delicious. And yet, that memory globe is tie-dyed with complexity. I feel joy and I recall fear and I do it all at once in this almost transcendent state. When I announce to my mom that I feel a bit unsettled being back, perhaps it is that confluence at play.

You have to watch Inside Out to really appreciate its beauty but over time, as Riley grows and transitions into a teenager, she starts holding the ability for these memories to become more complex. Memories can have a bit of Happy and Sad, Anger and Fear and Disgust, all at the same time. Now, if you go see the most recent Inside Out 2, you’ll learn that Nostalgia is an emotion too, but she’s represented by this dear old lady who sort of prematurely shuffles out of her room once or twice before being rushed away by the other emotions. Riley is a tween, that’s way too early for Nostalgia, I guess!

But yeah, I certainly feel it at 36, and I can only imagine how that grows over time. We get lunch with my great aunt and uncle and they recall stories from over 70 years ago, and I am amazed and astounded. I ask them questions like a reporter, eager to understand what someone must know after all that time. Sometimes, it’s simpler than I would really prefer. How did my aunt Eileen know she was meant to marry my uncle Ted? “When you go to a store and see a dress you like, how do you know? You just know.” Well, OK then.

Eventually I need to close this essay and perhaps I will do it with a song. It came on as my mom and I drove to Chatham or was it on the drive to Michigan or was it the drive back to Tucson with a post-monsoon rainbow in rear-view mirror? It’s a tie-dyed memory where Jimmy Buffett comes on and we’re singing together and I’m an adult now but I’m still her kid, and it’s a little sad now for some reason but there’s joy in there, too, and it means different things now than it did back then. You can’t hear the song without smelling fried food and the salty air, ocean breeze whipping endlessly on your skin.

And there's that one particular harbor
Sheltered from the wind
Where the children play on the shore each day
And all are safe within
Most mysterious calling harbour
So far but yet so near

Where I see the days as they fade away
And finally disappear