Nostalgia Isn’t the Problem

It's the proof you paid attention, and loved it anyway.

When I was a kid, my family and I spent our summers driving around the United States like we were being pursued. My dad was the type who’d see a roadside dinosaur attraction and decide it was worth the 90-minute detour, even if we were already low on gas and daylight. My mom, on the other hand, had one priority: getting to the motel early enough to watch the OJ Simpson trial.

This was 1995. I was 13 and Court TV was on in every lobby. I remember eating Cheetos from a plastic cup while Judge Ito mumbled something about admissibility, and my mom nodded solemnly like she was part of the jury.

We weren’t wealthy, but we had a routine. Best Westerns and La Quintas, always. If it had a continental breakfast and a pool that smelled of chlorine and pennies, it met our standards.

I loved it.

I didn’t care that the air conditioner rattled or that the bedspreads felt like they were made of tarp. I loved the sound of people dragging luggage across pavement outside our door, wheels catching every crack in the sidewalk. I loved the tiny soaps shaped like ovals served in those plastic packages that would never open without power tools. I loved that, some evenings, I could lie on the scratchy bedspread and watch the NBA Finals like I was somebody.

This was the golden age: Michael Jordan vs. everyone. Reggie Miller with his chicken legs and angry eyes. Hakeem bobbing, weaving, and spinning through defenders. We’d arrive just in time for tip-off, and I’d angle the TV to face only my pillow. My parents would fall asleep halfway through the second quarter while I stayed up watching athletes decide the fate of June.

I didn’t know it at the time, but these moments were cementing themselves in me. Not because anything monumental happened, but because everything did. These were the years before cell phones, before scrolling, when your choices were limited to what was in front of you. And what was in front of me was usually a vending machine, a dusty parking lot, and a kind of gentle, slow-moving magic I didn’t have a name for.

Nostalgia is often painted as regression. The emotional version of hoarding. But, I don’t see it that way. Nostalgia is what happens when you’ve paid attention to your life. It means something mattered enough that your body remembers it before your brain does. You catch a whiff of a certain kind of asphalt and you’re ten years old again, burning your thighs on a vinyl seat in the summer Texas heat.

When I became a photographer, I thought I was chasing light. Now I know I was chasing that particular feeling. The motel lamp glow. The last light of day cutting through a dusty room. I don’t photograph for accuracy. I photograph to remember how it felt to be alive in a specific moment. I want someone to look at one of my prints and feel a little punch in the chest, the way I feel when I see an old La Quinta logo or hear the faint buzz of a CRT television.

Getting ready to reside full time in Ireland is different kind of beauty. The light there is slower, softer, less showy than the American West. The roads are narrow, the signage confusing, and the butter is life-altering. I’m learning to love it, but nostalgia follows me around like an overly familiar friend. Not in a sad way. Like a tour guide who taps my shoulder gently and says, “Remember this? You didn’t know it at the time, but this was one of the good parts.”

Some people try to shake it off. They think nostalgia keeps them stuck. But I’ve never found it paralyzing. It’s more like a signal flare. A way of remembering what I value. It shows me that I once cared, that I noticed, that I lived with my eyes wide open even when I didn’t know it.

I see it in my kid now. He’s four. He calls hiking “climbing the outside,” and he insists on using the same water bottle purchased from Buc-ees every morning. I know, without question, some of these moments will imprint on him. He’ll forget the name of the castle we visited last month but remember the way his wet socks felt in the car afterward. He’ll remember the jelly packet from a hotel breakfast, or the way I sang badly to an old Fleetwood Mac song while crossing into a county I cannot pronounce.

That’s nostalgia. Not longing, not weakness. Just a kind of quiet muscle memory for the soul. You don’t get nostalgic over things you barely noticed. You get nostalgic over things that shaped you, even if they were small, even if they were strange. A parking lot. A court case. A series of improbable basketball heroes.

Sometimes I still check if hotel waffle machines are working. It’s not because I need the waffle. It’s because I need to know that something familiar still exists. That the world, for all its changes, still holds pieces of the version I loved. That I loved at all.

And really, what could be stronger than that?