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Would I want to go back? – I was recently listening to an old song from the 80s on YouTube and happened to scroll down to read the comments. This can be a dangerous thing on some YT videos, but the comments on videos of old songs are usually full of people reminiscing about the good old days. After all, that is why I was watching the video and listening to the song in the first place. It was a song that was very popular when I was in high school, and listening to it brought back a lot of memories and emotions. I’ve been listening to a lot of songs from my youth these days, letting YT take me down random paths into the past. I would like to argue that this is because the 80s has some of the best music ever, but I know that I am also heavily influenced by the emotions associated with that music. Let’s just say I understand why my dad always used to listen to music from the 50s and 60s when I was younger.

At any rate, I was idly scrolling through the comments when I came across one that caught my eye. It was relatively recent (from two weeks prior), and it was by a guy who was a year younger than me and reminiscing about his high school years. I won’t quote the comment directly, but basically he said that he would give anything to go back and live that time all over again. I stopped and read it again, thinking I had misunderstood, but that is in fact what he had written. My first thought was: “Wait... really? You would want to live that time of your life all over again, and you would give anything to do so?!”

The second thought I had was that the commenter seemed to have moved in very different circles from the ones I moved in when I was in high school. He wrote of football games, of dances, and of “the loves of [his] life.” At the risk of pigeonholing some poor guy I’ve never even met, it sounds like he might have been a jock. (I don’t know if this word is used anymore, but it was a derogatory term we used to refer to athletes.) The most popular girls somehow all ended up as cheerleaders (or at least it seemed that way), which meant that they ended up going out with the jocks. At the other end of the social scale were the burnouts. These were the kids who hung out behind the school, wore leather jackets, and smoked; the moniker was a reference to the smoking habit, but it was also a judgment that they would never amount to anything. Goths are another high-school subculture that is heavily represented in pop culture, but we didn’t really have a goth contingent in our school. Lastly, we had the nerds or geeks. I belonged to this tribe and did suitably nerdy or geeky things, like working on the school newspaper or hanging out in the computer lab. But I was also a marching band geek, which I guess was a sort of geek subculture.

You’re probably familiar with scenes of nerdy kids getting bullied in various ways if you’ve ever watched any film from the 80s set in a high school—or, say, the music video for Bowling for Soup’s “High School Never Ends” (BFS is really into the nostalgia trip; cf. also “Almost,” “1985,” etc.). You might be expecting me to say that I had a very similar experience, but I didn’t. I never got stuffed into a locker, had my head shoved into a toilet, got “wedgied” or “pantsed,” or anything like that. Now, I was bullied in elementary (primary) school. But in junior high (middle school) my parents decided it would be a good idea for me to study martial arts. Somehow word got out that I was learning karate and the bullying stopped immediately. I thought that was a little weird, since I had only just started and didn’t really know anything yet, but I wasn’t about to argue. Anyway, the upshot is that, by the time I got to high school, even if I wasn’t one of the popular kids, I was pretty much left alone.

As such, I guess I ended up having a pretty good time in high school. Sure, nerds and geeks get made fun of, but we still know how to have a good time, just like everyone else. I had all sorts of fun with my friends on the school newspaper or in the computer lab, and marching band in particular left me with some indelible memories. I remember being on the field at football games, too, but that was during the halftime show. And these performances were only practice for what we really cared about: the competitions. I have very fond memories of performing my tiny part in our elaborate routines for those competitions. The bus rides back were always fun, too, especially after we had done well.

I also went to the school dances. It is true that junior high dances tended to be awkward affairs where I busied myself holding up the gymnasium walls, but halfway through high school I came out of my shell and started dating. My first relationship was a doomed long-distance one with a girl from upstate who had the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen (I can’t lie... sorry, HJ). My second girlfriend went to my school... and she also happened to hang with the burnouts. I think that was the first time I truly realized that there was more to people than the little boxes we tried to cram them into. To be honest, I can’t quite remember now how we got together, but our relationship was appropriately passionate and stormy for a high school romance. That one ended after we both went off to college and I eventually broke her heart like a cad.

Look, I get it. Even after all these years, I remember what it was like to be young and falling in love. You can’t stop thinking about the other person, you always want to be around them—and when you are around them you are walking on clouds. Every touch is electric, every kiss sets the heart pounding, and you feel like you could just stare into their eyes forever. The world could crumble to pieces around you and you would never even notice, or if you did notice you certainly wouldn’t care. The other person is your world. They are an angel sent down from heaven just for you, perfect in every way and incapable of wrong.

I’m not going to tell you that these feelings aren’t real or special. They are both very real and very special. But they’re not love. We say that we are “falling in love” when we feel these things, but the problem is that we use the word “love” to describe a lot of different things. The feelings we generally associate with “falling in love” are actually infatuation, and while this often precedes a deeper, truer love, it is not love itself and doesn’t even necessarily lead to it. This confusion is why my first girlfriend broke up with me. It has been many, many years since then, but the one phrase that I remember from the letter she sent me (yep, she broke up with me by letter) was: “The magic is gone.” I remember thinking, “Magic? Is that what you think love is?” In her defense, she was fourteen years old (which now seems very young to be having a boyfriend and would explain why her father always seemed to be trying to terrify me). I wasn’t much older, and I’m not sure I really knew what love was either, but I knew enough to know that it wasn’t “magic.” Lest I paint myself in too positive a light, though, I broke my next girlfriend’s heart because I still hadn’t learned what love was. It took me many years to figure it out, and if I’m being completely honest I think I’m still working on it.

I’m not going to expound here on what I think love is—that would be an entry all its own. The point is that I had no idea what love was back in the 80s. Yeah, I listened to all of those classic songs about love and I watched all of those coming-of-age teen movies where the guy gets the girl in the end (I’m looking at you, John Cusack!). I probably thought I understood what love was, but I realize now that I saw through a glass darkly at best. The idea of looking back now, in my fifties, and thinking of those relationships as the “loves of my life” is absurd. I can’t imagine having never moved beyond high school romances. Of course, there are high school sweethearts who marry and end up being very happy with each other. That’s great—but I’d be willing to bet that if you asked them what the most meaningful phase of their relationship was, they probably wouldn’t say “high school.”

But back to my initial reaction to the comment: Why would someone want to live those years all over again? I suspect that it might be a case of looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses—ignoring all the negatives of high school and romanticizing the positives. I’m not going to lie: Looking back at my high school years now, life really did seem so much simpler back then. True, we were still in the Cold War and living with the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, but that wasn’t something I really worried too much about as a teenager. I mean, when had we not been waiting for the Soviet Union to drop the bomb? When you live with something for your entire life, that’s just your normal. And I think that, for the most part, we were still pretty optimistic about the future—we just knew that, somehow, things would work out. At least my friends and I did. The things we worried about were much simpler, smaller-scale problems. Was I going to be able to hang out with my friends over the weekend? Did that girl really like me or was I reading the signs wrong? How little studying could I get away with and still get decent grades?

The truth is, though, that while all these things seem simple and innocent now, they were kind of a big deal to me then. It’s easy for me to say I want to go back to those simpler times and forget about all the cares and worries of being a middle-aged man, but that’s only because I have perspective now. This is essentially a function of time. When I was in high school, those four years represented a much greater portion of my life than they do now, so they naturally had a greater importance back then. There’s also the fact that it’s hard to have the proper perspective on something something while you’re still going through it. When you’re in the middle of the whirlwind, it can seem like the whole world is being torn apart; it’s only when the whirlwind passes on that you see that most of the world is still intact.

And yet when I read the comments on these YT videos of songs from the 80s, I am surprised to see how many people my age look back longingly on those days through rose-tinted glasses. I sometimes wonder if I am the only person who remembers what it was actually like to be a teenager. There is a reason I wrote above about how high school wasn’t really all that bad for me and how I had a pretty good time: It wasn’t what was going on around me that made life difficult, it was what was going on inside me. For all the hope there was also uncertainty, for all the excitement there was also anxiety, for all the happiness there was also disappointment, and for all the joy there was also pain. Yes, I realize that this is a pretty good description of life in general, but it’s different when you’re a teenager. Not only do you not yet have perspective, you also have to work out how to navigate all these emotions and experiences while dealing with the hormonal chaos of puberty and trying to figure out who you are as a person.

Not that I don’t understand the appeal of youth. I think what appeals to me most about being young is having all those endless possibilities before me. When you’re young, your life stretches out before you like an infinitely branching road, each path running off until it hides behind a bend or is lost in the mists of the future. Once you start to figure out who you are, the rush of having a universe of possibilities before you can be intoxicating. This rarely happens in adolescence, though; usually things don’t start coming together until your twenties. I distinctly remember having no idea who I was as a teenager because I was too busy trying to be the person I thought others wanted me to be. So if you held a gun to my head and told me I had to relive a period of my youth, I might go for my more innocent childhood or maybe my university years—pretty much anything but high school and my teenage years.

But would I even want to go back at all? Another way of phrasing this question is: Was I happier in the past then I am now? I don’t think I was—certainly not in high school, at the very least. I have a much better idea of who I am now, I’m more confident, and life is pretty good. As I hinted at above, things started coming together for me in my twenties, not long after I graduated from university (and left the States). This was when I finally figured out what I wanted to do with myself. It was also when I met the actual love of my life, to whom I’ve been married for over a quarter of a century now. If I could encapsulate what I have now that I didn’t have back in high school, it would be “emotional stability.” That might sound a little boring, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the tempest of emotions that is adolescence.

If there happen to be any young people reading this... well, first of all, how do you do, fellow kids? I don’t know if what I am going to say from here on out will sound the least bit convincing to you, but I’m going to forge ahead anyway. I’ll start by saying that, while I may have not had all that bad a time in high school, I know a lot of people who did, people for whom those 80s high school movies were all too real. If that happens to be you, here is the good news: High school does end, despite what Bowling for Soup would have you believe. Of course, Bowling for Soup don’t really believe that high school never ends, either. What they meant was that some people never outgrow the high school way of thinking. You’ll meet people like that throughout your life, but as you get older you’ll be better able to deal with them if you have to or just ignore them if you don’t. High school itself, though, and the very awkward period of adolescence that it coincides with do indeed end.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that life gets easier as you get older. In fact, in many ways it gets harder—if it didn’t, we wouldn’t look back with longing to “simpler” times. Even when I was in high school I knew that things weren’t going to get any easier, and frankly it terrified me. If I had such a hard time handling what life had to throw at me as a teenager, what hope did I have of making it as an adult with so many more cares and worries? All I knew was how much of a wreck I often felt like, and I couldn’t imagine that there would ever be a time when I wouldn’t feel like that, when I might be able to handle life without feeling like I was on the verge of cracking under the pressure. This was my biggest fear when I was younger: that I would grow up to find out that I couldn’t handle life as an adult.

I did eventually make it out of the whirlwind, though, to bask in the sunlight beyond. I became an adult and discovered that I was quite capable of handling whatever life threw at me. Anxiety, self-doubt, fear of failure... these I left behind as one might leave behind childhood toys. Ha! I’m kidding, of course. I really do wish it were that simple. I wish I could tell you that my old fears have lost their power, that they never creep up on me in the small hours of the night to whisper in my ear: “You can’t do this. You’re never going to make it. Sooner or later, everyone’s going to find out that you don’t have any idea what you’re doing.” It’s the same voice I heard as a teenager, and I’m here to tell you that, unfortunately, it never really goes away.

But if my fears and doubts are still there, how could I possibly be happier now than I was when I had far less to worry about? Well, there is the perspective that I mentioned above, but there is something else that comes with time: experience. Simply put, the more I’ve lived through, the more I’ve learned how to deal with things. More importantly, I’ve come to realize that the anxiety and uncertainty that haunt me are not uniquely mine but a fundamental part of the human condition. The truth is that we’re all just fumbling and bumbling our way through this life, hoping that no one notices. I can guarantee you that even the people who seem to have it all together—or, maybe, especially those people—struggle with doubt and fear just like the rest of us. Anyone who tells you that they don’t struggle with these things is lying, either to you or to themselves.

And since I’m not lying to you here but instead being painfully honest, I’ll tell you something else: It has been a few weeks since I first read that YT comment I mentioned above. Yes, it’s taken me that long to write this. This is partly because I had to figure out what I wanted to write in the first place. The American writer Flannery O’Connor once said: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” This entry was an exercise in proving that little bit of wisdom. My first draft was just me trying to get out the various things that I wanted to say, but it didn’t end up making much sense. I took what I learned from that and started a second draft, which I wrote and then rewrote (and then rewrote some more). I would start writing about something, realize at some point that I was just babbling, and then go back through what I had written to find the kernel of what I had really wanted to say. I would then restart with that kernel and write until the babbling started again. Let’s just say it has been a very iterative process.

But that’s only part of the reason it has taken me so long to write this. The other part of the reason is that I got stuck on the question I posed six paragraphs ago: Am I truly happier now than I was then? When I first set out to write this entry, I was confident in my positive answer. The more I wrote, though, and the more I plumbed the depths of my memories and how I felt about my life today, the less confident I was in that initial reaction. This downward slide continued until I found myself in a funk—I couldn’t figure out if I was really happy or not. I thought about all of those possibilities that had stretched out before me when I was young. I thought about how I had made choices that quietly closed doors on most of those possibilities, narrowing down my path until I arrived at where I am today. What if I had chosen differently? Might things be better than they are now?

It was a bit of a “Good Will Hunting” moment for me. If you’ve seen the film you know the scene. In their first meeting, Will provokes Sean by telling him that he must have married the wrong woman, and Sean nearly strangles him. The next time we see Sean, he is sitting alone at a table in his kitchen with a bottle of Bushmill’s, lost in thought. But when Will arrives for his next session with Sean, Sean takes him out to the Commons and tells him that he realized that Will is just a kid who doesn’t know anything but what he’s read in books, and after that realization he went to sleep and didn’t think about Will again.

Well, I had a couple of realizations of my own that brought me some peace. The first is the realization that my reframing of the question—of whether I would want to go back to my teenage years as a question of whether I am happier now than I was then—was flawed. I think I fell victim to this flawed equivalence because of the emphasis modern society places on happiness. But I suppose this discussion requires me to clarify what I mean by “happiness,” as this is yet another one of those words that has to cover way too much ground. For as rich and colorful as language can be, it’s not that great at describing human emotions; our emotional experiences are far more varied than the words we have available to describe them. This is why foreign words like “schadenfreude” or “saudade,” which refer to very specific emotional experiences, are so popular among English speakers who learn them. “Happiness,” on the other hand, could mean a multitude of things. It could, for example, refer to a deeper, unwavering satisfaction with life. But this is usually not what we mean when we say we are “happy.” This is true especially in the particular context we’re talking about here, as the emotions that are churned up when listening to old songs are associated with specific memories and specific situations as opposed to life in general.

What I’m trying to say is that nobody is happy all the time. Sometimes you’re happy—but sometimes you’re sad, sometimes you’re angry, and sometimes you’re disappointed. None of these emotions are inherently bad. Everyone gets into a funk every now and then, and that’s OK. I don’t think we tell ourselves this enough, so I’ll say it again: It’s OK to not be happy. Now, if you are depressed—and I mean genuinely depressed, so much so that you can’t see the point in getting out of bed in the morning and don’t see a way out of your situation—that’s definitely not a good thing. But if you just find yourself having a case of the blues, or feeling a little apprehensive about the future, or feeling disappointed in a certain outcome, that doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. It just means you’re human. It also means that it’s not helpful to ask if you are happier now than you were at a certain point in the past. You’re probably looking back to a happy memory or set of memories—through rose-tinted glasses at that—but you may not be feeling particularly happy in the present moment.

I mentioned above that the one thing I have now that I didn’t have in high school was emotional stability. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have my ups and downs—obviously, I still do. But it does mean that the ups and downs aren’t as severe as they used to be. I may not often experience the same euphoric highs I experienced in my youth, but I also don’t experience the same crushing lows. To give a specific example: Is every day I spend with HJ as exciting now as it was when we first started dating? No—but with the experiences we’ve shared, both good and bad, the days are certainly more satisfying. I am much more content with life now than I was when I was younger. And it’s not as if life is boring; there are still plenty of exciting things to look forward to.

The second realization will probably strike you as blindingly obvious when stated plainly, but a lot of people act is if it is not a fundamental truth of the universe. That realization is this: No matter how much you might want to go back to a certain time in your life, you can’t. The only slightly less obvious corollary to this is that you also can’t make time go any faster, no matter how much you might want to skip past a particular dark valley to reach sunny fields ahead. I’ve not been guilty of the former, but I must admit that I have often been guilty of the latter. I’ve found myself thinking that if I could only get through a difficult time, or achieve a certain goal, or reach some important milestone, then I would be content. But life doesn’t work that way. I’ll get through that difficult time, or I’ll reach that goal or milestone, only to discover that there is something else preventing me from being content. The truth is that if you can’t find contentment where you are right now, you’re never going to find it. You can’t be truly content living in some imagined past or future.

I was originally going to write “remembered past or imagined future,” but then I reminded myself that we imagine the past just as much as we imagine the future. We don’t remember the past in the way that you might retrieve data from a hard drive so much as we reconstruct it every time we access it, and we do so imperfectly. These reconstructions can be influenced by simple distance in time—the longer ago something happened, the less likely we are to remember it exactly as it happened—or more complex factors like our current mental state—the past might look rosier, for example, if we happen to be feeling particularly blue in the present. For this reason, an imagined past is no more real than an imagined future. The only thing that is real is the moment we are living right now. Everything else is ultimately an illusion.

I don’t want to get too philosophical here, so I’ll just say that these two realizations—that what really counts is not “happiness,” which can be fleeting, but satisfaction or contentment, which are much more substantial; and that we can only ever truly live in the present—helped snap me out of my funk. I can’t go back, but even if I could I wouldn’t want to. This is partly because I wouldn’t want to have to go through the pain, anxiety, and disappointment of being a teenager again. But, really, I just want to live in the present and enjoy my life now. I don’t want to be missing life because I am preoccupied with an imagined past. I am grateful for my past, because it led me to where I am today, but living it once was enough.

I’m not saying that I don’t have regrets. Of course I do. I remember telling myself when I was young that I wanted to live my life with no regrets, but now that I am older I realize that this just a fantasy. What I meant was that I wanted to take every chance that came my way, to walk through every open door. But that’s only part of the equation. I think I was under the impression that I would regret the things I didn’t do far more than the things that I did do. But with some years under my belt now, I can tell you that I haven’t found this to be true at all. Maybe it’s because I have indeed done my best to live my life to the fullest and not let chances slip me by; I can’t say that I’ve made the most of every opportunity, but I’m satisfied that I’ve made enough of most of them. Instead, I find that everything I truly regret in life has been something I’ve done. More specifically, I regret the things I did to hurt the people that I cared about.

I am tempted to say that if I could go back in time, these are the things I would want to do differently, but the truth is that even my most shameful moments—even those moments when I acted against who I thought I was and who I claimed to be—helped make me who I am today. Everything that I have experienced, everything I have said, everything I have done—both good and bad—has been woven into the fabric of who I am as a human being, and it is impossible to pick apart and isolate the various threads. Some things that I perceived as negatives at the time I experienced them ended up leading to positive outcomes in the future, while some things that I believed to be positives did not turn out to be good for me after all. But I only realized this years after the fact, when I was able to look back and see how everything had played out.

But I am, after all, fairly content with my life, so you might think that it is easy for me to say that I wouldn’t want to change anything. Perhaps this is true. But that fundamental truth of the universe that I discussed above still holds. Even if you are not happy with where you are in life, the answer to your problems does not lie in the past. Nor does it lie in the future, on some far off day when you will finally be “happy.” No, the answer lies in the choices you make today. You are the culmination of everything you have experienced in your life up to this point, but your past is not your destiny; your future is yet to be written. If you’re not where you want to be, figure out what you need to do to get there. It’s not going to happen all it once, but it doesn’t have to. All you need to do is take the first step today; you can take the next step tomorrow. That might sound a little preachy, but I’m really talking to myself here. Yes, I’m probably more content than not, but that doesn’t mean I have it all figured out or that I am exactly where I want to be. So I’ll continue to take it one step at a time. And after all the fiddling and fussing I’ve done with this entry, all the rewriting and reworking, I think it’s finally time to wrap up this step and move on.