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Key points
- Middle-aged adults often look back on their childhoods with fond feelings or nostalgia.
- Sometimes we exaggerate how good our childhoods actually were.
- Perhaps nostalgia is a normal part of taking stock of life and mortality.
Now in my early 50s, I’m closer to death than I am to birth, even with optimistic expectations. This isn’t a fact that particularly bothers me as I’ve been fortunate in recent decades… I have a good job, a lovely family, and I live in Orlando, my favorite place in the world. Nonetheless, I oftentimes find myself reflecting on my childhood in Rhode Island. When I’m at home in my dreams, the house is almost always my childhood home of 20 years, not my current Orlando residence.
This year, I returned to Rhode Island to poke around my old haunting grounds. The site of a Renaissance Faire I once participated in as a teen, my old schools, my adolescent job, a lake beach my mother used to take me to, and of course, my childhood home. It was a lot of fun to trample around in my old past, and I still feel a fondness for each of these locations.
Which is funny because my experiences at some of them really weren’t that great. I was lucky to have good parents and a nice home, and my teenage job at a hospital was actually pretty awesome. But I was a shy, short, nerdy kid with the kind of social success with my peers that you might expect. Other than casual Facebook acquaintances, I’ve lost touch with even the few friends I had from that period. So I have no real connections to the state (my parents moved out years ago to follow their grandson, our son, around as we moved).
Enjoying a glance at my old home, the lake beach, or the awesome teenage job site makes sense. I have fond memories of those. Yet, I also find myself with a weird attachment, particularly to my elementary school… a site of frequent loneliness and bullying. Similarly, my experience with the Renaissance Faire was a mixed bag at best. But I love walking through the woods where the Faire was held (which is the historical site of Nine Men’s Misery, a site where the colonial militia was tortured by the American Indians they were fighting); in a way, I feel an attachment to it that I wouldn’t to any other patch of forest.
My wife has sometimes asked me why I’m attached to places in my youth that were, at best, mixed experiences. If it were simply nostalgia, surely, I’d be attracted to only those places with positive memories. Or perhaps I’d lie to myself about how well things went at these other places. But I’m well aware my school experiences, in particular, are nothing I’d particularly want to repeat.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure there’s anything in the psychological literature that quite explains this. Nostalgia bias, our tendency to overinterpret the positive aspects of the past, is a thing to be sure. But I don’t think that fully explains my experience.
Age obviously is a factor. I always enjoyed revisiting my old haunts, but the feelings do seem stronger now. Perhaps the melting away of my own family (my dad died a few years back) is one factor. Mortality, perhaps, is another. Perhaps it’s natural to relive our imperfect childhoods as we take stock of the entirety of our lives. For what it’s worth, it’s mainly a pleasant feeling. My adult life has been good, so I have no regrets.
Perhaps the best way of thinking of it is that I rather liked the little guy who was the younger me. With the wisdom of age, perhaps I could have handled the challenges of some of those experiences better. But sadly, there are no do-overs.
In the end, as they say, there’s really no going home again, and there’s nothing in Rhode Island for me anyway. I hate the cold; I no longer know anyone there. By contrast, I’ve got a wonderful family and friends in Florida, I’m near Disney and the beach, I’ve got an awesome job, and the weather is gorgeous year-round. If my dreams take me back to the past, I suppose I don’t mind the occasional visit.
