Recently, I’ve been having flashbacks to moments from my childhood. They’ve been more like fragments of solitude rather than any life-altering event. Instead of reliving the highlights, I’m snapped back into moments that should be long forgotten, but for some reason, for a few seconds during the day, I’m back to being nine, playing in the living room with Playmobil, or sitting alone in my room, constructing baseball fields out of my Legos.
In a way, when I have these flashbacks, I do find myself nostalgic for these times.
But what exactly am I nostalgic for?
It’s not like I’m pining to relive the days of my childhood. I have the benefit of working a relatively stress-free job while living in a city that I love. There’s not a burning desire to go back to “the good ole’ days” because, fortunately, that is probably the period I’m living in now.
To leave what I have and get the chance to relive my childhood would frankly be a nightmare.
I lost most of what connected me to my hometown within a few years of moving. If not for my sister and her husband living there, I would have probably not stepped foot in the town since 2014. I’ve spent far too much time in the last eleven years wondering how I could leave a place where I spent the majority of my transformative years without any roots, and wondering whether or not I ever stood a chance of enjoying growing up.
I was seven when I moved to Boone, North Carolina. The next nine years were divided into two stages: the first six years, marked by a loneliness masked as contentment with the status quo, and the last three years, marked by constant battling for my own freedom.
A turbulent relationship with my siblings was about the only constant throughout. In an ironic twist, homeschooling was likely more damaging to the family dynamic than helpful. There was no escape in school because school was home.
Homeschooling also deprived me of a lot of the typical childhood experiences. I hardly got to spend time with kids my age until middle school, and even middle school and beyond featured a series of getting jerked around until I was apathetic to trying to adjust.
Where is the nostalgia in that?
It’s easy to argue that spending too much time reminiscing on the faults of my upbringing is reductive. If I’m going to struggle to reconcile how disappointing I find childhood, I have the privilege of simply ignoring everything that happened.
But in the midst of all the trauma (for lack of a better word, though it feels undeserved in a sense), it’s hard to deny there’s something that I miss, even if it doesn’t make sense to me.
Perhaps there’s always going to be an inexplicable yearning to return to childhood. Marketers love nostalgia, after all. But this goes beyond just logos of products from rebrands past. I find myself missing the childhood state of mind.
Maybe it’s just that things are much more straightforward when you’re twelve. It’s easier to digest a world when you can divide people into good and bad guys or even when it doesn’t occur to you that generally decent humans can hold absolutely atrocious opinions.
Or maybe this inexplicable nostalgia simply stems from realizing how short life feels. At twelve, life feels like it’s just beginning. At twenty-seven, you’re basically thirty, and halfway to sixty. At twelve, the future feels unlimited. At twenty-seven, life starts to feel a little more locked in.
Maybe I’m not missing the past; I’m just missing when life felt like it would last so much longer.
Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.
