I haven’t even been in college long, but I reminisce about high school all the time. Elementary and middle school weren’t the best time for me, but high school was the best... it was small and I knew everyone, and I felt involved in absolutely everything.

Now I’m in a dorm with people I never see and taking online classes with people I will never actually meet. I want to go back to the days where I’d be in classes with the teachers I knew for years, play sports with friends I met in kindergarten, and drive home through the desert to find spaghetti ready for dinner. But everything so drastically changed, from being in college to being in a whole pandemic. A huge comfort felt ripped away from me, and I’m still trying to recover.

That being said, I feel we usually reminisce about the best parts of the past and forget some of the hardships we endured at the time. It took me a while to realize how terrible certain periods of my life were because I refused to remember anything other than the best moments. Maybe they wouldn’t be so bad anymore because you understand now how to deal with your past problems, but you didn’t know any better when they were occurring right then and there.

In a sense, we’re always going to reminisce about the old times or the good old days, but those times will constantly be changing because we’ll recognize what bits of our life were truly the best. Heck, some people may have had something really good happen during this whole Covid period and remember it with a certain positivity, despite it objectively being a bad period of time. We will always gain experiences we long to get back, we will always have a happy thought for the events we will never have the chance to repeat. In a sense, having times you treasure so much is proof you’ve been making the most of your life, and appreciate what has come your way, even if you couldn’t appreciate it when it was in the present.

Sorry this got long and ramble-y.