Certain times of year can make nostalgia become almost physical for me. September to December has a way of making everyone look backwards before they've even finished looking forwards, with photographs from summers that have already disappeared, old friendships being brought back into conversation and everybody secretly taking stock of what they did that year, what they didn't do and what they thought they would have figured out by now. 

New Year makes it even more obvious because we're expected to look at the previous twelve months from a distance, decide what they meant and somehow arrive in January with a coherent understanding of where we're going next. I've never been very good at that kind of reflection because looking backwards has never felt neutral to me. It can feel warm and comforting, but it can just as easily leave me with an ache I've never quite been able to explain.

Give me an old photograph, a school yearbook, a forgotten Instagram story or a love letter from somebody who hasn't been part of my life for years and I can find myself somewhere I haven't physically existed in a very long time. Sometimes I love that feeling because I'm reminded of a version of myself who had different worries, friends, ambitions and an entirely different understanding of what her life was going to become. 

Other times, it feels almost like opening a door I know I cannot walk through, because I can see the room perfectly clearly but cannot become the person who stood inside it again. The strange thing is that I don't necessarily want to. I can miss school without wanting to be sixteen, remember an old relationship with tenderness without wanting to repeat it and feel enormous affection for a period of my life that I remember being considerably more complicated than the photograph suggests.

What I'm really mourning is not always the thing itself but my ability to experience it exactly as I did then. Even if I could recreate the same people, the same music, the same bedroom and the same summer evening, I would arrive carrying everything I know now. The moment would already be different because I would be different.

i've always been nostalgic

I've always had a slightly complicated relationship with the past, partly because I have never been particularly good at letting things simply become memories. I'm the person who scrolls too far back through Instagram, rereads messages and finds photographs I haven't seen for years, partly because I want to remember what happened and mostly because I want to understand who I was when it happened. Looking at an old version of myself feels almost investigative. 

Sometimes I find a photograph and feel absolutely nothing because I genuinely cannot place the moment. There I am, smiling in a restaurant apparently living through a day that was important enough to photograph, yet the image doesn't unlock anything particularly meaningful. Then there are photographs where everything comes flooding back at once. I remember the song playing, the person I was seeing, what I was wearing, and some tiny detail that nobody else would remember because it only mattered to me.

What fascinates me is that neither version of memory is necessarily a perfect representation of what happened. We don't store our lives in some enormous internal archive where every day remains untouched and available for accurate retrieval. Autobiographical memory is reconstructed, which means remembering involves rebuilding the past from fragments, emotions, knowledge and the meaning we've attached to something since it happened. I'm not accessing the original moment. I'm experiencing it through everything that has happened since.

Psychological research has moved away from treating nostalgia as an unhealthy fixation on the past and towards understanding it as a complex, bittersweet emotion with several useful psychological functions. Nostalgic memories tend to be highly social, and studies have linked nostalgia with social connectedness, meaning in life, optimism, self-esteem and self-continuity, the feeling that the person you were remains meaningfully connected to the person you are now.

but why does it hurt so much?

If nostalgia can be comforting and even psychologically useful, why can it sometimes feel so awful? Why can seeing something from ten years ago leave me feeling as though something has been taken away from me?

Part of the answer might be that remembering something isn't the same as reliving it. The photograph stays still while we keep changing. The people in it don't age inside the frame. The street looks exactly as it did. Your old bedroom is preserved with the same duvet, the same posters and the same clothes scattered across the floor, while you're now thirty wondering how you somehow accumulated a decade without noticing.

That becomes harder to ignore as you get older because you have enough history behind you to understand what time actually does. At eighteen, twenty years sounds impossibly distant because most of your life is still ahead. At thirty, twenty years ago was childhood. School friendships ended more than a decade ago. People you haven't seen since you were sixteen are now adults with careers, partners, children and lives you know almost nothing about. Memories that feel emotionally close can be objectively very far away.

Grief isn't limited to death. We lose relationships, friendships, homes, routines, places and futures we once assumed would happen. We lose versions of ourselves without ever consciously deciding that they should disappear. Sometimes what we're mourning isn't even something tangible, but the knowledge that a particular experience can never happen in exactly the same way again.

Turning thirty has made that much more obvious to me. I have enough past now to measure the distance between then and now, while still feeling as though I'm only beginning to understand what adulthood actually means. I can remember being sixteen with remarkable clarity and still find it difficult to accept that sixteen is no longer remotely close to where I am in my life.

the strange business of becoming an adult

When I was eighteen, I imagined thirty as a distant, fully assembled version of adulthood in which I'd know exactly who I was. I thought there would be an invisible threshold where adulthood arrived in its final form, bringing certainty, confidence and the ability to make sensible decisions without spending an unnecessary amount of time wondering whether I was doing everything wrong.

Instead, I'm thirty and still feel strangely similar to the girl I was as a teen, just with considerably better self-awareness. The biggest difference isn't that I've suddenly become somebody else. It's that I'm much more conscious of time and of how many things can change.

I've always found that difficult because I don't like change. I like familiarity. Getting older makes it tough because nothing stays in precisely the position where you left it.

You don't get your school years back in their original form. You don't get to be twenty-two again, with all the possibility and uncertainty that existed before you knew how certain things would end. You don't get to meet someone for the first time twice.

I've noticed this when people return to my life after a long time. My memory can still have them filed away according to the person they were when I knew them best, complete with their face, their humour, their voice and the particular feeling I associated with being around them. Then I meet the adult they've become and have to reconcile that person with the version I carried around in my head.

Neither version is false. They're just different people at different points in the same life.

We have to accept that everyone else is changing too, often without us being there to witness it.

i miss people i wouldn't choose again

There are relationships I remember with genuine tenderness that I would never want to repeat, places I associate with happiness even though I know I was anxious or lonely while I was there, and periods of my life that look beautiful in retrospect despite the fact that I remember desperately wanting to escape them at the time.

Memory changes the emotional proportions of our lives. We don't necessarily remember every difficult Tuesday with the same intensity with which we experienced it, and the passage of time can make certain memories feel more significant than they seemed while we were living them. 

Positive feelings associated with nostalgic events become less prominent while regret and loneliness can become more pronounced in later recollection. That feels painfully relevant when I think about old relationships, because what I miss isn't the relationship I had. It's the future I imagined while I was inside it.

When you loved someone before you knew how the story would end, you were attached to every version of the future that seemed possible. An old love letter can feel strangely powerful because the person who wrote it didn't know what you know now. They were writing from inside the possibility of the relationship, while you're reading it from the other side of the ending.

That might explain why I can feel tenderness towards somebody without actually wanting them back in my life. I don't necessarily miss the reality of what we had. I miss the person I was before I knew how it would turn out.

comparison really is the thief of joy

Social media has made my relationship with nostalgia considerably stranger because we now have unprecedented access to our own pasts. There was a time when remembering your childhood meant finding a photograph in a box in the loft, opening an old album or waiting for somebody to bring out the family videos at Christmas. Now my adolescence is sitting inside my phone, searchable in seconds, complete with photographs, videos, messages, locations and fragments of conversations I'd completely forgotten existed.

I can look at myself at twenty-two whenever I want. I can see what I wore, where I went, who I knew, who I loved and what I thought was important. Having that much evidence of a former life can be comforting, but it can also create the illusion that the photographs tell us how we actually felt.

A photograph of me smiling can become evidence that I was happy. A holiday can convince me that my life was better. I know how anxious I was in some of those pictures, what happened before and afterwards, which friendships were already deteriorating and which relationships looked considerably happier from the outside than they actually felt when I was living them.

I probably was happy at that particular moment. But a moment isn't a life, and I think that's where nostalgia can become tangled up with comparison. We compare today's complicated, unfinished existence with memories that have already had their endings written for them. The present contains uncertainty and things that haven't happened yet, while the past comes with the reassuring knowledge of what happened next.

maybe nostalgia is a way of asking who we are

I notice myself becoming particularly nostalgic when I feel uncertain about who I am or where my life is heading. When you're changing jobs, moving house, ending a relationship, turning thirty or simply looking around and realising that your life doesn't quite resemble the one you imagined, the past becomes familiar territory. I know who that girl was. I know what happened to her. I know where certain stories ended.

I don't know what my life will look like at thirty-five. I don't know which friendships will still exist, who I'll love, where I'll live or what I'll be doing. I don't know which completely ordinary moments I'm currently overlooking will eventually become the memories I would give anything to revisit. The future is full of possibility, but possibility can be uncomfortable when what you really want is reassurance.

Nostalgia can heighten when people experience loneliness or a threat to their sense of meaning. 

It's what makes me wonder whether some of my nostalgia is more about wanting reassurance that I haven't somehow lost myself along the way. I'm reminded that I've belonged somewhere before, that I've been loved before and that I've had friendships and relationships that mattered deeply to me.

so, is nostalgia a silent killer?

Probably not, although I understand why it can feel that way when you experience it as intensely as I do.

What matters is what we do with the memories.

I've spent years assuming that feeling nostalgic meant I wasn't moving on properly. If I still remembered somebody years later, I wondered whether I hadn't let them go. If I felt emotional looking through old photographs, I wondered whether I secretly wanted the past back. I'm realising that memory doesn't work quite so neatly. 

i don't want my past back

This is probably the part I've had to learn most carefully.

What I want is to be able to remember the memories without feeling as though remembering means I've somehow failed to move on.

The past doesn't need to be recovered to be valuable. People don't need to return for the relationship to have mattered. 

I will probably always be nostalgic. I will still become emotional around Christmas and New Year, scroll through old Instagram stories at an entirely unreasonable hour and find a photograph from 2014 that makes me wonder where the hell the last decade went. An old song will probably still transport me somewhere I haven't been in years, and somebody's name will still occasionally bring an entire period of my life back into focus.

But I'm learning not to treat that feeling as an instruction.

I don't have to go back because I miss something. I don't have to reopen a door because I remember what was behind it. I don't have to turn an old memory into a current desire just because it still makes me feel something.

I don't believe nostalgia isn't asking me to return.

It tells me that I've lived, I've loved people, and people have loved me.