Nostalgia is everywhere right now.

The Things Nobody Names.
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I do not know if you have noticed but it is in the marketing, it is in the products, it is in the content, it is in everything that gets made and sold and clicked on. Someone somewhere figured out that nostalgia converts and now the whole internet smells like 1994.

And honestly? It is working on me. I am not immune. I have never pretended to be immune.

But nostalgia is not one thing. That is what I keep thinking about. What nostalgia actually is depends entirely on what you are being taken back to and who you were when you were there.

For me it is three things.

Photo of a child playing

Sandy e Junior on an afternoon. That one takes me straight back to being a kid in Brazil. The specific feeling of a childhood that did not know yet that it was going to end and send me somewhere entirely different.

Sandra Bullock movies. Every single one. That is adolescence. The particular optimism of being young enough to believe that things work out in the second half of the film.

And then there is Home Among the Gum Trees by John Williamson.

That one is different. It does not take me back to childhood. It takes me to becoming. I moved to Australia at around twenty years old, maybe younger, and I had some of the best years of my life there. And when that song comes on I am immediately back on a train with my earphones in, on my way to the Gold Coast or the Sunshine Coast, not yet knowing what I was becoming but feeling it anyway. The specific feeling of being young in a country that was not yours and somehow belonging there anyway.

That is the nostalgia that gets me. The one for the version of myself who was just starting to figure things out.

I think that is what nostalgia actually is, at least for those of us who have lived in more than one place. It is not just missing a time. It is missing a version of yourself that only existed in that specific combination of place and age and not-yet-knowing. You cannot go back to it because it was not just the place. It was you, then, there. And that combination is gone.

Which is, when I think about it, exactly what the Identity Void is pointing at from the other direction. The Identity Void is the grief of losing who you are now. Nostalgia is the longing for who you were then. The same feeling pointing in opposite directions.

I am going to go listen to Home Among the Gum Trees now. Do not talk to me for approximately four minutes.

What is your nostalgia? The specific one. The song or the film or the smell that takes you somewhere you cannot get back to. I genuinely want to know.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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I Do Not Remember the Dream. I Remember Her Face.