Nostalgia Romanticizes the Prison and Calls It the Good Old Days

Nostalgia doesn't keep any of that. It just keeps the thin and fleeting moments of confidence.

Nostalgia edits out everything else.

I'm in Germany right now, going through old pictures with Olaf from when we were dating. I come to this one photo and I stop. I'm looking at this woman in the picture, "Oh my gosh, who is that?" She was very thin. And then it hits me. That was me.

That moment reminded me of something that happened many years ago. I was sitting with my grandma looking through pictures, and I felt it immediately: that wistful pull. I'm looking at myself thinking, "Wow, I looked so great. I was so thin. Look at my body." I felt kind of proud. And then my grandma looked at me and said, "Gosh, I'm so glad you gained weight and you're not that thin anymore."

I remember feeling so upset. Like she pulled the wind right out of my sails.

But here's what I need to tell you: what my grandma saw and what my nostalgia saw were two completely different things.

Nostalgia is selective amnesia. It deletes the pain and preserves only the comfort. So yes, I was thin in that picture. But let me tell you what else was true about that thin body. I was hungry. LIKE REALLY hungry. I was restricting, obsessing over every bite, running myself ragged trying to maintain it. I was afraid to have dinner with people because food was screaming at me. I was comparing my body to every other woman in the room. The cruelty I spoke to myself was so sad to think about.

But nostalgia doesn't keep any of that. It just keeps the thin and fleeting moments of confidence. Nostalgia edits out everything else.

I see this happening with so many perimenopausal women right now. We're being told through marketing and social media that when we were younger, our bodies were so much better.

Our bodies were tighter with more energy. We could push ourselves without the cost of crashing. We could drink more without getting hung over. And we look back and believe that lie.

But here's what's true: just because our bodies could handle it doesn't mean it was good for us. Just because we had more energy to people please and to perform and to push ourselves into the ground—that doesn't make it better. Our bodies could do it, and we did it, and we think that's something to long for. But capability isn't the same thing as thriving.

My grandma saw something I couldn't see in my own nostalgia. She saw freedom. She saw me stepping out of suffering. And I was upset because I wasn't ready to accept that the thing I was mourning was actually a prison.

That's what nostalgia does. It romanticizes the prison and calls it the good old days.

Stop feeling bad about wanting to look and be like you used to. Wake up to what's actually true right now. The woman you are becoming is so much more alive than the woman you were editing in that old photograph.

This is where the real freedom is.

I'd love to hear: Where is nostalgia keeping you stuck? What old picture or old version of yourself are you using to tell yourself that now isn't enough?