Agony Addison // high school heartache and weaponized nostalgia
red flags just look like flags when you're wearing rose-colored glasses
New Moon, new us — new year, even! Each New Moon is a time for setting intentions, deciding what to do with your one wild and precious life, at least for the next month. Got a pressing quest or question for your internet aunt? Ask politely (or passionately, at least) here.
The dead days between Christmas and NYE (I truly can’t get into the apostrophe situation rn) are a great time to do some star-searching and soul-gazing, even if all you come up with is “damn girly you should put ‘proficient in procrastination’ on your LinkedIn profile”, to which I say actually I don’t update that site anymore and you’ll have to check my personal website with links to my Substack to keep in touch!
But yeah the procrastination problem is partly why I’m sending this five days after the new moon. It was Christmas! I was hosting! I’m working on it, sheesh! This is the last time I’ll acknowledge being late in this newsletter, though, so just keep an eye out for whenever a new Instagram story slams into your phone/door. C’est la me.
So here we are, finally through the familial holiday hurricane season and floating somewhere in the void, sitting with our feelings of inadequacy and trepidation at what is yet to come. This moon’s advice has a lot to do with looking back and reflecting, and how exactly we should carry our past into the horizon of our future. Let’s, as the kids say, get in-to it.
*submissions have been edited for length and clarity.
Hey, Agony Addison!!
I’m in high school, and I hate it, LOL! I can’t wait to move on with my life and get away from the people at my school (minus my close friends). High schoolers have got to be the most toxic breed of people. They don’t care about anyone but themselves, yet they care too much about everyone else’s business. I just want to go to college and start my career as an interior designer.
Others have been telling me to enjoy it because it’s the best time of your life — but these are the same people who clearly ‘peaked in high school’. I have not peaked in high school… I hope. I guess my question is: Is this really as good as it gets? Should I listen to these people? How did you get through the last years of high school without ripping your hair out?
— Literally Losing It
First of all, shout out to my high school readers! Please don’t make mean memes about my lack of rizz, that would literally send me flailing wildly over the edge. I’m a zillennial cusp and I will NOT be blamed for knowing what my Hogwarts house is! Fish naturally absorb the elements of the water they swim in! Ravenclaw was underrated!!!
Anyway, back to the wild and shifting topography of the high school social landscape. ACK! You won’t get that reference but the sound should still convey the appropriate emotions. It’s scary out there! Even when high school is fun, it’s also pretty ruthless. Everyone is oozing boatloads of hormones out of their literal pores (unless they’ve already started Accutane) and nobody knows how to properly navigate the tidal waves of emotions slamming into their underdeveloped bodies and undeveloped brains without wiping out everybody else standing on the beach. God! It’s brutal out here!
I’m assuming these are all adults telling you to stop and smell the cafeteria roses, because any high schooler who says high school is the best time of your life is a great example of why high schoolers don’t know anything — they’ve barely even experienced anything else. And that is not meant to be condescending! Right now, every year of your life feels so long and impactful because it is, because these are the only reference points you have to compare to. You cannot imagine what you literally can’t imagine. Ninth grade feels like 1/15th of your whole life when you’re in ninth grade, but once you get to 28, it’s just 1/28th of your life, and so on and so forth into the infinite future. The gravity of what you feel right now will absolutely fade, whatever shade it comes in. But I’ll let you in on something those adults with high school fever may have failed to mention.
During every single phase of your life, somebody will tell you that RIGHT NOW the best time of your life. And for somebody, it probably was! But as soon as you’re old enough to go to college, get arrested, join the military, or some funky combination of the three, suddenly all the parents around you are going onnnnn and on about how THESE are the best four years of your life, actually. People will go even harder about college because yes, you do have more responsibilities, but not really actually that much yet, and you get something big in exchange: freedom — a lot more freedom.
And then (hopefully) you’ll graduate, and everyone tells you non-stop how brutal the real world is, and they’re right. 23 is, in fact, the youngest you will ever be. You know nothing Jon Snow, and you’re finally beyond the wall. Hoping that any high schoolers reading this have actually definitely not watched that show yet.
So you muddle through your twenties, your powers waning with each consecutive hangover, and you flail and flap around in the method of your choosing trying to figure out yourself and the space in the world that you occupy. My space is currently in Brooklyn, New York Citay, where everyone says ACTUALLY your thirties are the best time of your life, especially if you follow the grand Big Apple transplant tradition of probably not getting married and definitely not having kids. You know who you are now and care less about everyone else’s opinions, supposedly. Check back with me in two years if the Internet still exists.
Then you turn 40 and, wait, actually, your forties are the best because you’re even MORE settled and even LESS afraid of the rest of the world. The fifties and sixties follow suit, with the great freedom bell of menopause clanging somewhere in the ether for half of us. Promoters will tell tales of no longer giving a single fuck, but still potentially having a good while to go. Physically, things continue to decline, but you will still find people out there extolling the virtues of your sixties, seventies, eighties and so on. Somebody somewhere is going to proclaim every decade of your life as the best. And it keeps going like that, until the end, and nobody knows when that will be. In conclusion: they’re all right. They’re all full of shit, too.
Every era has a trade-off, usually to do with exchanging freedom for responsibility. This is probably why some people get so caught up in the high school hallways; you are just getting your first real tastes of freedom, without having to take on much in the way of obligation in return. For some people, this is the golden inflection zone in which they would like to live forever. For the teens who already yearn deeply for an even greater sense of freedom, I truly believe the best is extremely, extremely yet to come.
But while you’re still there, I’ll share some of my favorite aspects of this specific part of adolescence, and maybe they’ll look shiny to you too.
One thing I relish the most about my high school experience (that I was supremely unaware of as it was happening) was having SO much free time to do absolutely NOTHING with my friends. To goof off and drive to Sonic and hang out in each others’ rooms, having silly conversations and catching up on all the drama from last night’s football game, without having to worry about what I was going to eat that week or the laundry I needed to do or how to bully myself into working out this month at least once for the love of god. Enjoy the elasticity of your idle time; it will stiffen.
Socially, things probably feel rocky right now. Teens can be really, realllly mean, but they also have a lot of capacity for change, because every single one of you is transforming physically and mentally all the time whether you like it or not. The craziest feuds can blow over with the gentlest breeze, and two girls fighting over the same guy one weekend will be getting ready for the dance together the next. All of that room for change applies to you too — you can try on new character skins, or even just one glove, and see how it feels on the inside. Because at the end of all this, once you finally make it to graduation, you’re leaving. At least, you can, if you want, and you get to start an entirely new game, with a few ideas in mind.
Your world is as small as it will ever be right now, which can feel suffocating sometimes, but it’s also a warm little cocoon for you to start testing out life in. You start to learn how surprising and infinitely layered the world can be, and that even the most formidable social rules can be shattered in an instant.
As far as surviving the gauntlet of teen socializing goes, I recommend shifting your current point of view. Sometimes when I feel particularly anxious about a situation or a choice I need to make, I think of how a biographer would phrase it in a memoir of the long and glorious life I plan to live. Would this particular embarrassment, or friend fight, or theatrical breakup, even make it through final edits? Would it even be a blip in my personal life section on Wikipedia? Probably not! Or if it is actually kind of a big deal Addison, how would I want to read about one of my idols reacting to the same situation? Sifting through our feelings about an upsetting incident is definitely important, but zooming out to a wider view can take some of the pressure off our immediate experience.
Here’s something I definitely did but would tell my younger self to do even more of in hindsight; take notes. Take stock of your life, the good, the bad, the heinous, and mark it down somewhere in some way. It doesn’t need to be pretty or meaningful or deep, just record it; print out the photos and write journal entries and make cards for your friends for every single holiday, full of inside jokes that you won’t even understand in thirty years. Preserve an echo of yourself to listen to in the future, both for posterity and reflection, and also as a method of actively processing your life as you’re living it. Do something now to help you better do the Joan Didion quote thing later.
“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
The rest of the world is coming for you, at its own pace, regardless of whatever else happens in the meantime. So let yourself feel your feelings, however unattractive they may be, and then write down a list of the aspects of your life that you really, really like right now. Add to it when you think of something else. Save it for when you’re 28 and trying to write advice for a teenager in a newsletter that might not always be totally appropriate for teenagers. Maybe someone whose birth year gives you heartburn can use it one day <3
Hi Addison,
I’m a sentimental person. I tend to look through everything with a romantic lens. This is often a good thing and helps me remember my past positively, but also means that I may obscure my memory of past events and forget “The Bad”. Do you have any advice on being too nostalgic? Or is it not too bad?
— Sappy and Sad
Oh honey…. this whole answer is going to be a pot-calling-the-kettle-cookware situation. Let me start by placing my hand on your shoulder in an affirming and not-creepy manner, like an overly-familiar waiter, and say that I FEEL you, you and your fears, all the way in my bones. No that’s okay you can keep all those commas I actually have so many more!
Milan Kundera once said, “The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” Pretty quote-heavy answers this go-round, huh? Well idk if this one counts or it’s just me trying not to start an essay with “THE GREEKS DEFINED NOSTALGIA AS…” like I did once in an indie food magazine the week before I read a tweet about how hack it is to do that. Not a lot of nostalgia around that particular memory.
Anywhomst. Nostalgia is like a deja-vu / self-sustaining drug crossover event. It’s a drug in that it produces goo in our brains that feel good, and it’s like deja vu in that it’s a little bit of our brains lying to us very convincingly. No, you haven’t actually experienced this before in an alternate reality, you just got some neurons crossed. And also that relationship or job or apartment wasn’t actually perfect, it just had some characteristics that are missing from your life now, so it feels “good” (can’t stress enough how big these finger air quotes are) to remember another time or place or situation in which you had those things that you want. It’s linked to longing, to desire. Maybe Freud had a point… but he lost it with all those other foul balls (wink).
I would classify nostalgia as falling somewhere on the blurry section of the soothing-to-painful emotional spectrum. It seems like our brains are probably aiming for soothing, but land somewhere nearby depending on which particular memory has been selected for the task. We can try to delete the painful part of the emotion by glossing over the painful parts of the memory, but we are still left with the trickiest bitch of them all: yearning.
We are feeling nostalgia because we desire something we do not currently have; we are pining after a real or perceived loss instead of engaging with our current realities. The idea of the loss begets a sensation of having been harmed, and therefore needing to be soothed. Really hoping this doesn’t sound like a Jordan Peterson podcast appearance rn — bear with me, or bear without.
To address the pain caused by the nostalgia, we soothe ourselves with other nostalgia, and the cycle continues. Maybe nostalgia is handcuffed to “the grass is always greener on the other side” in some sort of big budget buddy comedy starring Will Ferrell. Maybe we do actually see the glint of the steely nostalgic sword and are using it to punish ourselves for whatever we did to earn those perceived losses. Maybe our inner children just want a break from being adults and are giving us a timeout, or maybe we’re all just masochists in emotional drag.
And that perceived loss doesn’t need to have any actual tie to our own lives. Do you ever get nostalgic for places you’ve never been? Or time periods in history that you weren’t alive for? Or fictional realms that only exist in the human imagination? And this nostalgia is, like, not very different from the other one, right? ISN’T THAT KIND OF CONCERNING!?
Nostalgia has historically been one of the more dominant and prominent facets of my personality. The TikTok therapists would say I had a real gnarly case of maladaptive daydreaming as a youth, constantly wandering into elaborate imaginary worlds whenever I was bored or scared of this one. My current therapist would say something about undiagnosed ADHD just trying to cope. I say being an adult sucks and I’m having soooo much more fun living in my brain juice, until very abruptly, I’m not.
Somewhere along the way, some of this tendency toward nostalgia mutated into something fidgety, annoying, and ugly: aggressive anxiety. Instead of imagining all the wonderful worlds beyond this one, my brain began to produce new and terrifying scenarios of all the things that could go horribly, horribly wrong in real life. Intrusive thoughts! 10 points to Ravenclaw on the Buzzwords board. We all imagine every car that passes us could careen across the lanes and plow through our windshield, right? Or what if we got in a really nasty fight with our friend and everyone else in the group took their side and cut us out completely? Maybe we’ll leave a window open and our cat will escape into a wild and dangerous city, sure to be violently killed immediately and never seen again? AND IT’S OUR FAULT!?!?!
I also started to daydream about people I had a crush on, fitting them into different scenarios to find which was the most comforting in the moment. Literally using other humans as puppets to soothe my emotional sounds. Heads up to the readers; this is a really good way to catch feelings for an idea of a person instead of who they actually are! It’s also a great way to set unmeetable expectations without anyone else being none the wiser. If you’re one of my high school English teachers, please write back with the grammatically correct version of that sentence because it gave me a headache.
Nostalgia, an idea ostensibly related to the past, does a great job of fucking with the future when teamed up with creative anxiety. I feel nostalgic about places and people I don’t actually want to return to, and then I get scared that I won’t be able to accurately convey all this emotion and the complexity of it to, like, my sister’s kids in twenty years, and impress upon them the weight of the experience. AND I WON’T! Because I know how much I’m unable to imagine my own parents’ childhoods and how uninterested I was in their nostalgia. I am pre-grieving a pain I have not yet experienced, thereby forcing some of that future agony into existence now. What fresh hell, indeed.
But the fact that nostalgia is a creation of our imagination can help us see it more clearly. The longing you feel is for a curated, edited version of events — literally a story that lives only in your head. So maybe it’s okay to anchor a few sentiments there if you need a spot to drop some emotional weight so you can keep swimming, but you don’t want to drag that baggage into your future decision-making. Shit will drown you. Nostalgia seems to be most attractive to people who feel more pressure and/or anxiety in their current lives than they once did (most of us), but seeking it out probably won’t actually alleviate much of that pressure in our day-to-day.
I think nostalgia can serve a purpose as long as you keep it in the backseat and don’t let it drive. It’s okay to look back fondly on days gone by, and it can be especially healing to actively lend compassion to younger versions of yourself (see the Joan Didion quote from earlier). Just be sure to take the Big Life Decisions out of nostalgia’s hands, and give her an etch-a-sketch or something. This separation is especially important when it comes to relationships that have changed significantly since the rose-tinted vignettes in your memories.
Let the stories live and keep the maladaptive daydreaming to a therapeutic level. DM me for book recommendations if you need some high-fantasy slow-burn romance realms to escape from your escape to. I hope I never read the word nostalgia again in my damn life.
Enjoyed this envoy of advice? Well you and I are certainly company enough, but sometimes it’s fun to be part of a crowd. Send this letter to your friend who needs to hear it but won’t take your advice, like a teenager who knows what Substack is, or Owen Wilson’s character in “Midnight in Paris” (we hate Woody Allen but we love to romanticize Americans having mysterious adventures in France).
Looking for even more somewhat-solicited input? Last month we waxed poetic about playing pretend tourist, puppy-training your boyfriends, and how to pull yourself out of a toxic friendship quagmire. And not the giggity giggity kind (thank the LORT).
Thanks for asking for my opinion on things — it makes life worth living and that’s a high bar for me these days!! Please add some more Q’s to the queue, and don’t be afraid to get wiggity wiggity weird with it <3
Nostalgically,
Addison Anthony, Nerd Alert, House Ravenclaw