Alongside the release of our latest poetry print edition, Nostalgia, we wanted to release some of our archived, longer pieces exploring the theme. Lastly, a TWSS writer discusses their experiences with PTSD, and how this can create a tumultuous relationship with memory, life, and nostalgia.

[TRIGGER WARNING: This article discusses topics of a sensitive nature, involving SA, mental illness and PTSD.]

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There are two songs that I can guarantee will make me cry every time they play. One: Lucy Dacus’ ‘Thumbs’. As someone with a very turbulent relationship with an abusive dad, that one’s quite self explanatory. The other, much less so – who in their right mind breaks down to Wild Cherry’s ‘Play That Funky Music’?

I would say that my experiences with PTSD can be split into these two categories. The first – the ‘Thumbs’ category – the direct, painful fallout that renders me catatonic. The sinking feeling, the all-consuming knowledge that I will never fully recover. The feeling of being broken. We’ve all read those horrific statistics that state that 97% of us have, or will, experience some form of sexual assault – I reckon that if you were to flick back through my childhood photo album, you could almost pinpoint it to the day. First day of reception, first ballet class, first day of being bruised and not quite normal. When, at four, your life is altered irreversibly, nostalgia materialises in a peculiar way. I find myself looking back desperately for the time before which, of course, I can’t really remember. I am deeply sentimental for a time that, in actuality, barely existed at all. Retrospection of course, is not purely a wistful thing, with the past being so wound up in anger, shock, pain, sadness, the list goes on. And yet, to people’s constant surprise, I wouldn’t change a thing. In fact, looking back at my childhood evokes, more than anything, an enormous sense of pride. The 4 year-old me sitting in a courtroom was infinitely stronger than I could ever be now, and the 13 year-old version of me running away from that house was far braver than I will ever be again.

That is where the second category comes in – The ‘Play That Funky Music’ category. Comical, I know, that, whilst the song blares across nightclub speakers and everyone has the time of their lives, a small piece of me dies inside, but that’s part of what makes living with PTSD so strange. Of course, no one in Thekla on a Thursday night would know that this song is the last one my brother and I ever listened to before I left home (frankly it would be creepy if they did!), but it’s a memory I just can’t shake and that hurts me to my core.

Self-preservation, survival instinct, whatever you want to call it, comes in many forms and, unfortunately, with many enormous consequences. When I left home, undoubtedly saving my own life, I had to leave behind half of my life. My siblings, my dog, the works – because the harsh reality hit me that they were safe, and that I was not. ‘Play That Funky Music’, for me, creates a stronger feeling of nostalgia than any other singular force. It reminds me of everything I left behind: of the time that wasn’t before, but wasn’t quite after either. It’s nostalgia wound up in a strange form of grief: mourning the present as if it were some kind of alternate reality that I’m no longer in. 

The first time I watched Good Will Hunting, I was confused as to why I broke down when Robin Williams yelled out “it’s not your fault”. This, of course, is true, but it doesn’t feel that easy. That deceptively simple statement made me question my entire history, my entire mindset and, I’ll be honest, is one that I’m not sure I fully believe even eight years later. Maybe I never will. I would say that the guilt I have about the past is almost as, if not more, difficult than memories of the events themselves – an ideology that I know I’m not alone in. Because for me – and for others who share similar experiences – the act of being nostalgic is first and foremost a dangerous one, it puts far, far too much at risk. I know that, if I think about it too much – what I did, what I didn’t do – it will kill me, and yet it’s the very thing that I know would make me ‘better’. 

Of course, I say ‘better’ with many pinches, bags, truckloads of salt. Realistically, I know that I will never feel ‘healed’, or the way I did before, but I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. My strange relationship with nostalgia and memory is slowly teaching me that getting ‘better’ is not a case of looking back and ‘fixing’ our pasts, but building on the hope that, in the future, we can be sentimental towards the people that we are right now, in this moment. I have given up all aspirations of these parts of my past being anything but unsettling and painful, but if I can live with the knowledge that, 10 years from now, I’ll be as nostalgic towards my 21 year-old self as I am of my 4 year-old self, then I’ll have done alright.