Suffering from nostalgia
Can you experience PTSD from writing a memoir? At what point does looking back switch from personal growth to a damaging obsession?
The other day I woke up to the sound of my dogs barking uncontrollably. Usually only the tiny Pomeranian makes a peep; my aging Black Lab rarely likes to leave his kennel unless food is involved. My boyfriend Isac went to investigate and discovered a homeless man resting on our porch. He offered him food and drink before suggesting he move on.
“The guy from the laundry room is back,” he told me when I inquired. This laundry room gentleman likes to sleep in the laundry room in the apartment building next door. Last time we saw him was a couple months ago, when the police took him away after a confrontation with a tenant.
“Why do you think he keeps coming back here?” I asked Isac. In his previous career Isac was a housing worker and he possesses an innate sixth sense about people.
“Something in this neighbourhood must be familiar. I’ve seen it before — when people feel lost, they want to come home.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my desire to return home in my writing. I’ve always been predisposed to looking back, against my family’s wishes. I think of how many times in my life I’ve started and stopped writing about my family’s history, after a relative chastised me for “dwelling on the past,” and “not moving on.”
In the Orthodox Hebrew schools of my youth, we learned early on about Lot’s wife, an unnamed figure who, when escaping Sodom and Gomorrah had the audacity to look back and stare at its destruction. The story captivated me for years since what could be more human than looking back at a tragedy? I always related to that need — to explore what transpired even if it hurts, to understand where we came from even when others want to look away.
I’ve come to think of personal history as a wound. You can only bandage it for so long before it festers. At some point, you need to air it out. So you go back, and recall the sounds and smells that took place years ago. It sounds enticing but it brings with it all those long-buried emotions. Then, when you are out of the moment, you need to reflect on what it all means. It turns out, time travelling is really exhausting.
Yet we keep going back and pressing on that wound again and again just to see if it’s healed. Nope, not yet. Let’s poke it one more time. Ouch. Still hurts.
So, it intrigued me when I recently discovered that nostalgia was once considered a mental disorder. The context was a New York Times’ story about a newly re-surfaced slave narrative by John Swanson Jacobs, brother of Harriet Jacobs. The narrative was discovered by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder, a scholar investigating turning his Ph.D thesis on nostalgia into a book. He came across a reference Harriet Jacobs made about her son, who like her brother John, made his way to Australia, and later died by suicide. On death certificates, the cause of death in cases of suicide was sometimes listed at “nostalgia.”
Nostalgia, as a medical condition, was coined by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer in 1688. Hofer observed that people living far from home, like soldiers, sometimes experience a psychological burden so oppressive they died as a result. The word is derived from the Greek — nostos meaning returning to your native area and algos — for grief or longing.
It was (is?) a devastating disease, with doctors at the time observing that it could lead to death by suicide, neglect or a “dampened immune system brought on by depression [that] sometimes left people more susceptible to fatal illnesses.” The only cure, it appears, was to return to where you came from. Ultimately, that wasn’t an option for the soldiers and slaves afflicted with the disease.
Back in the days when it was a devastating disease, some referred to nostalgia as “hypochondria of the heart.” I love that term. To me it suggests the heart, rather than the brain, is conjuring the pain up. The longing is an illusion. Home was never really the way we remember it. The good old days, were only ever good for some and according to a new data, our age plays a bigger role in determining when things “were good” more than anything else. It turns out 11 is the magical age, when families seem tightly knit, societies appear just and communities safe and close.
Maybe the “laundry room man” (as I have come to think of him) lived in this neighborhood when he was a pre-teen. If so, I feel his pain. I have for years resisted returning “home” to the apartment building where I lived with my grandmother. I often dream of the off-limits shared balcony space I used to sneak onto to write and smoke cigarettes as a young teen. It’s been 25 years since my last cigarette but even today, I would relish the idea of hopping that fence one more time with my pen and notepad and lighting up, hoping to recapture some of that magic.
By the Victorian era, the malady of nostalgia was often lumped in with melancholia, a common justification for institutionalization in an asylum. Only later in the 20th century, did the definition change to something more positive. But I still wonder, when does the feel-good sense of nostalgia turn sour? When does looking back become problematic? How do you turn back when the home you are nostalgic for no longer exists, or rather never did?
“Today, we no longer hope for a cure [for nostalgia.] The ‘passing ailment’ has turned into ‘the incurable modern condition…The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia,” wrote Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia.
That leaves me with nothing to do but to keep pressing that open wound, which I do in this book I’m writing. Hold on a second while I poke it one more time.
I wonder if it’s healed yet.
Want to indulge my nostalgia? Read these posts:
Utterly fantastic column. Totally get it. LOVE YOUR WRITING, Leah!
"Lot's Wife"- whomever wrote that story down for the Bible couldn't give her the dignity of having an identity independent of her husband?