Pleasant Nostalgia
Dear Readers,
I have been sick nearly constantly in the last couple of months. A wisdom tooth extraction turned into persistent tonsillitis, recurring high fevers, and utter exhaustion. I should have seen this coming. In the last three years I have never stopped, not really; I got married, had two kids, moved twice across the Atlantic, started a doctoral programme, left it, and changed career. It’s finally taken its toll me, both physically and emotionally. So, I’m not surprised that I got this unwell. I think my body decided that it had enough. I needed rest. I needed looking after.
Luckily, this is exactly what I got. My husband and our families made it possible for me to recover. I had to - with much frustration and resistance - stop doing most of my normal activities. No reading, no writing, no looking after the kids, no cooking. I just rested. I felt guilty about it, but the decision was out of my hands. I had to take a break if I wanted to get better.
Funnily enough, this time of illness and rest also coincided with an autumn season that marked many important dates for me. It was five years ago in October that I first moved to Oxford to study; five years since meeting my now husband; three years since we moved to Toronto for what was a brief but extremely meaningful ten months of our lives. I also turned twenty-seven in October, the age of Anne Elliot, the oldest Jane Austen heroine. I know it sounds dramatic to say (all my friends in their 30s mock me for this) but this is the year I started to feel old. I’ve grown white hairs for the first time, I can’t tolerate lack of sleep as well as I could when I was twenty, and I’ve got nostalgic, VERY nostalgic. I keep reminiscing about when I was a student here. Then, about being pregnant in Canada, and all the friends we left behind. It wasn’t all perfect, but of course, memory has a mischievous way of selecting joyful moments and disregarding difficult ones. As Fanny Price says in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, ‘memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!’.
It’s easy for nostalgia to turn sour, or even worse, to get you insidiously stuck in the past. While being so sick, all I wished was for things to go back to the way they used to be at calmer, happier times in my life. But that’s not healthy, not only because we can’t live in the past, but also because it betrays a lack of hope for the future. In the coming months, as I finally emerge from what felt like a very protracted and very demanding postpartum season, I want to cultivate a pleasant nostalgia. I want to use happy memories as encouragement to give myself to both my family duties and my creative pursuits fully. I want to write again, I want to think of October not as the month when so many past happy memories are stored, but as the month of new beginnings; not as the time when, each year, I get older and more tired, but as the time when the new academic year begins, when my children, once older, will go to school and ask me for help with homework; the time when the leaves turn a thousand wonderful colours and Oxford gets chilly, foggy, and yet more beautiful than any other place on earth; the time when, after the summer, I sit down and plan new projects to work on. To quote Anne of Green Gables ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’
As I get back to writing, you can also expect me to update my substack more frequently. I don’t want to destroy my immune system by overworking myself again, so I may not post weekly as I used to, but I will try to post twice a month. To those of you who are still here reading, thank you for sticking around. I appreciate it more than I can say. As always, let me know if there is something specific you’d like me to write about.
Until next time, I wish you all a wonderful Sunday.