Seeking connection through telling everybody everything
Nostalgia can be downright painful. I'm glad I stopped writing it all down for people to read.
I found my old Tumblr the other day. Inspired by everyone seemingly going back to it (but with absolutely no desire to “go nuts” or “show nuts”), I requested a new password and logged on. And there I was pretty appalled to find I’d posted two month-by-month accounts of the years 2011 and 2012, and that they were still very much on the internet.
These month-by-month accounts were a tradition of mine that started in around 2007. First posted on the subscription-based “Back Room” of The Student Room as “The Round Robin you wouldn’t want your parents to read”, I’d started something of a trend as people joined me in painstakingly recalling what had happened in the year past. Of course, we were all sixth form or university age, or thereabouts, so back then an awful lot of things did happen to us in those years. So I’d sit down in late December and painstakingly recall everyone I’d got off with, every stress I’d encountered, the festivals I’d been to, the small and big successes I’d achieved. Some things are incredibly stressful to read back (in 2011 my sister had been thrown out by my mum and when I was writing this was still incredibly fresh) and some things are just downright tragic (the 2011 round robin ended with “my relationship with so-and-so has been going and continues to go well”, and my 2012 round robin begins with “so we’d had a huge argument about spending new year together, then we split up”).
Now I’m in my 30s I no longer feel the need for these annual confessionals. In fact the last one was written in 2013, when I was 22. It just feels like a lot less life happens these days. I go to work, I come home to my boyfriend, with whom I don’t argue or especially fret about, at weekends I am tired from work and enjoy sleeping and the odd day out. When I was 17 I was, for some reason, terrified of being settled. I remember saying how intensely dull I thought the life of the main character in “Autumn Almanac” by The Kinks sounded. I wanted adventure, and excitement. I mean, let’s be brutally honest here, I wanted to be in Skins. As an unpopular, extremely depressed 17-year-old, I envied beyond belief the friendships and dramas of these fictional and, not especially realistic, characters. Once I got to university I got my wish, to some extent. There were bad choices, university occupations, inner conflict, and a lot of angst. I’d been somewhat prepared for this by the internet “meets” I’d been to through the aforementioned Student Room forum, but at university I really felt I was living.
Of course, when I look back, and read back, on my life at university I now see that I was, again, very lonely. I fell out with people, I was a bad housemate, I thought I was the protagonist of reality on an extremely regular basis. It’s nice to realise that at 31, I like being myself, on the whole. And I’m settled. Not quite Autumn Almanac settled, but there’s not much I want to change (apart from my whole life, but more about that later).
When I laid out all of my misdemeanours every year, I told myself I was doing it because I wanted something to look back on, because I wanted to reflect on the year. I think what I was actually doing was throwing out every detail of my life in the vain hope that something would connect with somebody, anybody. And that I had something to show for my year of angst and worry and questionable choices. I thought that telling everybody everything was the best way to forge the connections I wasn’t having offline, because I was neurodivergent and didn’t know exactly what that meant for me yet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately. Not the “remember proper dustmen” nostalgia, but that feeling where you feel happy and sad and longing for things which have gone. It’s a thing which sneaks up on you, I had it the other day watching the video for Don’t Delete the Kisses by Wolf Alice, because it made me feel both old and some nostalgia for being young and foolish and thinking I was in love. I’ve been relistening to the radio series Sounds of the 20th Century, which is a double dose of nostalgia, because it reminds me of being in my final year of uni, finally actually knuckling down to coursework and revision and beginning to get the grades I was capable of getting, whilst listening to these audio collages. And, of course, I’m reminded of being 4, and 5, and 6, and 7, half formed memories of the start of Channel 5, the early days of easy access internet, Elton John struggling to hold it together as he sung Candle in the Wind. It’s a nice nostalgia, rose tinted by time and the plasticity of your brain in youth. It’s not really the same as how I feel when I read those round robins, which somehow feel like ages ago and yesterday all at once.
There are key times in our lives our brains seem to get stuck on. For me, I often go back to 17, with the internet meets and the early days of drinking, and to 21, when I left uni and started working. I suspect in future I will find myself returning to 29, the year I went through some of my toughest times, and then got my life and my confidence back. Already I find myself thinking of my days writing my master’s dissertation on The Triangle in Bristol with a fondness they really don’t deserve. This was only 5 years ago.
I’m thankful I don’t have writings to tell me the minutiae of my life experience anymore, and that I don’t share every detail of my life in 2000 words and expect people to read it. I’m glad my life doesn’t have the “excitement” to warrant such a thing.
I am, of course, planning on moving my entire life to the US and becoming a graduate student, and maybe that will bring events which deserve chronicling and hindsight. Sometimes I think “well, I like my life now, why do I want to change it so radically”, but in some ways it won’t be so much of a change. I’m taking the person I love, I’ll be researching something I’m fascinated by (and is very much inspired by the communities I found on the internet in the days of the round robins), and the world is much more connected. Perhaps making a big change when you’re not running away from something is the best time to do it.
I still crave the connections I was seeking through the round robins. I do still tell people nearly everything about my life on Twitter, where I do in fact connect with people and get the feedback and reassurance and friendship I need. And sometimes I get sad and miss being young and silly. But mostly, I don’t. Mostly, I like being exactly where I am, and who I am. And that’s something I didn’t think I’d ever achieve.