Quote:
Originally Posted by waves
The following article captures the more negative nostalgic experience well, IMHO:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/colle...esence-absence
This description of nostalgia contains what I see as all the essential components. (The sentences are organized so as to launch into the negative aspects, granted.)
The word bittersweet characterizes the dual nature of nostalgia well, imho. 
My own experience is less negative than what is presented in the article. Nostalgia does not remind me, personally, of my mortality!  I also do not equate nostalgia with pining, any more than I equate it with homesickness. I see both as being forms of nostalgia. I get a strongly negative connotation from pining, which I view as a predominantly negative kind of nostalgia - one best avoided for the sake of sanity.
waves |
Hi, Waves,
Thanks for helping me think through this.
On the nostalgia scale I linked to in the first post I mostly got 2's (with 1 being "not at all" and 7 being "very much") so I have become aware that maybe I am out side the the norm.
But as you say these scores of ours perhaps would get thrown out due to bipolar. --- I did this a few days ago when mood was mostly o.k.
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Tonight depression feels strong and that messes with memory retrieval -- for the good or the bad. . . . But even on non-depressed days, I do not seem to have the strong memories that my sister and the brother right behind me have. For one thing, they mention names of people that we grew up with and I can remember very little about other people, song lyrics, events that seem important to them, . .
I think I might have lived in my head.
I might have lived some how in my own cauldron /sea/ . . (choose your own image.) I was probably alone a lot playing the piano, reading, talking to my pets, taking long walks . . . then when I turned 16 doing things I "had to" like driving one or the other sibling somewhere, making dinner for the family, and working . . . . . Even though I can remember more specifics of my 20s, I think I was still living in my head then as now.
. . .. So maybe I do have nostalgia -- as long as it could be measured on a different kind of scale that asked not so much about nostalgia but rather about how I feel about my feelings I had in the past . . .. or something like that.
Thanks.
Mari