Spring flirting with summer has always been a time of great nostalgia. I feel it often, but my affection for the past is particularly strong this time of year. I’m a nostalgia junkie. Always have been. I love anything designed to evoke feeling. Sentimental longing is like a pastime, even when painful. It’s the burn at the roof of your mouth you can’t stop tonguing, that knot of muscle you can’t stop mashing. Hurts so good.
What pain brings you pleasure?
I started working with a transcendental life coach. I met him through work and was immediately struck by his generosity of spirit, his welcoming demeanor, and honest expression - and, as a lover of words, his spiritual vocabulary. At my consultation we discussed anxiety. Despite all my good habits and tools to resource - yoga, running, meditation, mantra, inner child work, trigger hunting, nervous system regulation, decades of therapy - despite it all, I still sometimes battle crippling anxiety. (In this world, I suppose, who doesn’t?)
It happened again recently, and this time in a more public setting. I was setting up for my 3rd artist residency class with the kids, and suddenly, while looking for chairs to place at the tables, I could not breathe.
Why does this keep happening?, I asked in exasperation. Read this, he said, and jotted down the title of a book.
Fever dream high in the quiet of the night
You know that I caught it
Bad, bad boy, shiny toy with a price
You know that I bought it
The basic premise of Existential Kink is this: At the root of our bad habits and destructive patterns is some form of payoff, and if one is willing to enter a curious and honest investigation, it’s likely you will find some measure of pleasure, satisfaction, and enjoyment.
This really pissed me off. I was deeply annoyed listening to the entire book. (If only I could have thrown it across the room. Alas! Audio.) Nothing about my anxiety is pleasurable. And yet…when I put into practice the outlined exercise and openly, honestly considered what I might achieve after each episode - concerned attention, loving comfort, blessed release and therefore permission to rest - I had to admit that parts of me do benefit from this pattern. A thought bubbled up in meditation. Anxiety feels like Home.
Being honest with myself without judgment - for shame keeps the truth in the dark - allows me to pull back the curtain on the frantic little wizard of my shadow side, the one furiously flipping switches and turning knobs. It’s a sort of Jekyll and Hyde concept. One cannot have the light without the dark. They are inextricably linked.
I’ve started running again. This was a pleasure I lost last year, my runs more often than not truncated by severe spasms that sent me limping home. So far so good! What a joy to return to soundtracked pavement - and this is my favorite time of year to run, when spring is in full bloom and cool mornings disrobe into warm days that stretch longer and longer into light. The way the air feels, the crushed-olive smell of mulch, the patchwork return of color reminds me of every time I have fallen in love, each linked to a specific summer. I’ll pause here to say, thank goddess I chose correctly! My sweet husband was a summer lover. We met in this month 17 years ago, and I was running then, too. With every footfall, I let myself be cast back in time, to be enrobed in nostalgia where I can feel, over and over again, the tender pain of love lost and gained, sometimes simultaneously.
So cut the headlights, summer's a knife
I'm always waiting for you just to cut to the bone
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
And if I bleed, you'll be the last to know
Our past is the primary ingredient of our present. We cannot be who we are today without all the yesterdays that came before, and we are building all our tomorrows in this very moment. I’ve spent so much of my life judging my past selves, but it’s in vain as I am who I am now because of her and and every iteration of her. It’s a radical act to say to oneself and to the world, I like who I am, flaws and all.
What if, said my life coach, Instead of trying to stop the panic attacks, you just accept them. Embrace them. Let them be a part of who you are in this life, right now.
Acceptance is a revolutionarily powerful act, one that reclaims the agency we so often forfeit to others (such as to our Mr. Hyde shadow selves).
Someone once said to me, Nostalgia is a stupid and pointless emotion. I felt slapped in the face. I think I know what he meant, but the sentiment could not be less true to who I am at my core. I am drawn to emotive art. (You might argue that all art is emotive to someone.) I love horror and tearjerkers because they ignite sensations that remind me wholeheartedly that I am alive, my body and heart responding in tandem. Falling in love is a lot like terror and heartache holds hands with happiness. Grief is a form of love. I adore songs linked to memory, melody with the ability to time travel me to some other plane, like summer air. It is a beautiful reminder that I am connected to the cosmic divine. We all are, even at our most separate. That separation that we frantically construct and desperately uphold is an illusion. That is pain as pleasure at work and it serves a purpose, but so does tearing it all down and braving the overwhelm of connection.
I'm drunk in the back of the car
And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar (oh)
Said, "I'm fine," but it wasn't true
I don't wanna keep secrets just to keep you
Lately I’ve been obsessing over what I’ll wear to see T Swift in 8 DAYS. (EEEEK!) I haven’t been this excited for a concert in more than 20 years. I saw a lot of shows during my time in NYC, but none on this scale.
The same person who called nostalgia stupid and pointless also called me an emotional exhibitionist. If that’s true, I’m in good company.
I remember on a hot summer afternoon, driving across DFW, when a DJ made a comment about a curly-headed girl with a guitar. She’s one to watch, he said. She was barely anybody then, but that comment stuck. I didn’t think much of her again until 13 years later, on another summer day, when I was working what I thought at the time was my dream job, only I was miserable.
I was crying in my car when my Pandora played a Swift song. I’d heard it before, of course, but on that day, I listened with an entirely different perspective. Over the next few months I listened to more, from her early lovestruck country that connected me to my Texas youth to her vengeful foray into electropop where she reclaimed her cancellation symbol and reframed it as an emblem of revival. (I was dealing with bullies at work, so this was particularly resonant.) I felt like I, too, was coming back to life.
Too embarrassed to tell anyone what blasted through my earbuds, I kept all this to myself, but it was to her soundtrack that I found the strength to leave that job and find another that I love to this day. I have always been teased for my taste in music, but she was the beginning of me learning not to care so much about what others think. There is a diarist song that constructs the emotional landscape of every one of my past selves, and her more recent albums, grounded by a more mature love and perspective, played in the background as I bought a house, committed to daily writing, and dove deep into a yoga practice - in essence, I found the courage to become more fully myself. I had to connect with my past to embrace my present and open my arms to my future. This is what I think of whenever I hear her sweet voice.
It’s completely ridiculous that most Swift songs make me cry, and also incredibly gorgeous. We are lucky to be touched by art, from the obscure to the mainstream, and I wholly believe that if we are paying attention, art finds us when we need it most.
Swift knows nostalgia, is intimately in love with it, however pointless or stupid. She finds pleasure in the pain, gives us permission to do the same, and like many artists, celebrates the messy revel of rolling around in the dirt of the past and coming up covered in glitter.
I know these thoughts are a little all over the place, but this is my turbulent, vibrant, red-lipped, mud-caked, and sequined truth at this moment. I am learning to feel everything, to accept - dare I say, love - all the light and shadow, which is an act of finding pleasure in the pain. It’s all linked to this one, unified, and beautiful existence of being a spiritual being having a human experience. And this transitional time of year, of warmth and rebirth, flowers and sunshine, is when I feel it most.
And I snuck in through the garden gate
Every night that summer just to seal my fate
And I screamed, “For whatever it's worth
I love you, ain't that the worst thing you ever heard?”
Howdy, beautiful friends! Thanks for reading. If you feel so inspired, leave me a comment, share my words, recommend my newsletter. Writing can be a lonely pursuit, but a wonderfully fulfilling practice - and YOU are the alchemizing element. Sharing my work is what gives this practice meaning. Thanks for being part of the magic.
Thanks for sharing this, Elizabeth. I enjoyed and admire your candor and remarkable way with words. Trust you are doing well…and enjoy the concert!
I love your beautiful writings, as I can identify with so much of what you share. I miss you and hope we can get together again soon.