Nostalgia Now
Written by Marion Johnson
When we try to connect with girlhood as adults and revisit old interests or aesthetics, we instinctively look back on what we used to have. To connect with our childhood, we typically believe that we must reflect on the past. For this reason, honing in on nostalgia is often criticized as lamenting what is gone. However, when we limit nostalgia to our past, we relegate childhood feelings, experiences, and connections to what has been and can no longer be.
By reframing nostalgia, adults can reclaim the experience of girlhood. Girlhood is powerful because the things that make us feel nostalgic were not done to us — they were created by us. Sure, million-dollar marketing campaigns pushed Disney Channel onto our TVs, backpacks, and T-shirts, but casting spells like Alex Russo and playing Pixie Hollow was our doing. As a kid, my obsessions with boy bands and YouTube’s daily vloggers were pure, unadulterated joy. Fangirling brought me to places that most adults wouldn't dare go. Deep on Tumblr, Twitter fanpages, and Wattpad, we created entire online communities. Our childhood was a curatorial experience, unique to each person, in which we decided what was important to us. Girlhood is self-construction. Who we are today is formed by what mattered to us.
Interestingly, the marketing scheme of boyhood does not leave popular culture as we age. Superheroes, video games, guns, and sports are perfectly acceptable to be carried into adulthood. So why must girlhood be relegated to the past? Perhaps it's because while boyhood and manhood are linked in the expectation that boys act like men, our society places rigid boundaries on the transition from girlhood to womanhood. The cisgender heteronormative rites of passage, such as menstruation, losing your virginity, or marriage, are what separate girlhood from adulthood. Girlhood is something that is taken away.
We do not need to separate ourselves from our childhood. Girlhood makes us who we are. We do not have to frame our nostalgic interests as“ throwbacks” or“ reliving our past”. If we are doing it now, then it is present. Time is cyclical, and girlhood is ever-evolving. Contrary to the concept of rites of passage, we do not lose anything as we enter adulthood; we simply gain experience. Girlhood is generative, and it reinvents itself as we grow.
It is not lost to me that some things are gone forever. Nostalgia consists of memories, people, and things that we have lost, and we miss them dearly. But some things we can get back. Are there things we yearn for that can still be ours? How can we make our nostalgia generative?
Girlhood in its purest form can be experienced as joy, compassion, friendship, possibility, hope, peace, protection, community, and freedom. We deserve to feel these things forever. We deserve a future where these things are available to us in adulthood. By reframing nostalgia as our now, we can reimagine our futures.
Nostalgia is not always about reliving, which constrains girlhood to the early parts of our lives that are seemingly no longer, or not supposed to be, a part of us. Nostalgia can be remembering. When we yearn for something we remember, we are identifying a need. You know that feeling of excitement when you remember that you have a sweet treat in your kitchen? Think of girlhood like that sweet treat. You don’t just have to yearn for it. You can get up, open the fridge, and grab it. It’s waiting for you.
