When Memory Rebrands Anxiety as Freedom

I miss being twenty-five, though I spent most of that year complaining about uncertainty, low wages, and not knowing what I wanted from life.

Now, at thirty-nine, I romanticize that confusion as freedom. The anxiety I felt then about having no clear direction has transformed in memory into possibility. The financial stress becomes “simplicity.” The relationship drama becomes “passion.”

This is how nostalgia works—it’s a powerful editor, keeping the golden light while discarding the shadows, preserving the soundtrack while muting the discord.

I catch myself telling Arash about my university days as if they were magical, forgetting how often I felt lost, overwhelmed, desperately wanting to be older, more settled, more sure of myself. The very stability I now have—the thing I yearned for then—sometimes feels like limitation.

Happy laughs when I wax poetic about our early relationship, conveniently forgetting how many nights I stayed awake worried about money, about whether I was ready for marriage, about whether I was capable of making anyone happy.

“You complained constantly,” she reminds me. “You wanted a steady job, a savings account, to feel like an adult.”

She’s right. But somehow, time has transformed those struggles into adventures, that uncertainty into possibility, those sleepless nights into evidence of how deeply I felt everything.

Maybe we’re nostalgic for difficult times because difficulty makes us feel most alive. Struggle requires all our resources—physical, emotional, mental. When life is easy, we operate at partial capacity. When it’s hard, we discover reserves we didn’t know we had.

Or maybe we miss the person we were when we thought our problems were temporary, when we believed the next phase would solve everything, when we still trusted that life would eventually make sense.

What if nostalgia isn’t about missing the past but mourning the death of future possibility?