The doctor called it acute homesickness: a state of longing for what no longer exists that’s so severe, it becomes an illness.
This is where the word nostalgia comes from, coined in the 18th century by a Swiss physician treating service members of the first World War who were separated from their countries.
It comes from the Greek nostos and algos, which means “the pain of returning home.”
It’s the kind of pain that can hard to let go of—because it’s what formed your ego. Letting go of important times, places, and people can feel like losing yourself, because in a sense, it is. Moving forward feels like closing doors on timelines we convince ourselves still could be, each one a tiny universe that shaped us.
This is what the word “nostalgia” really means, though common parlance equates it with cutesy and retro; TV dinners, VHS, and cassette tapes. It conjures phones with cords and answering machines, when you could disappear briefly and everyone communed over the same sitcoms.
You can still go back and watch the reruns. But it won’t take you back there; not really.
Besides, you may find some of those jokes haven’t aged so well; that seemingly innocuous storylines now belie deep-seated cultural fears, biases, and systemic injustices. Sometimes I ache for the analog days, but I sure don’t miss when homophobia and misogyny were a de facto part of our collective prime-time plot, even among those of us who fashioned ourselves progressive.
Besides, progress is relative. It depends where you’re coming from, and where you’re going.
Whenever I come back, it’s same same, but different. This time has more finality, as the storage unit that once contained a million little fragments of the quantum versions of me, my markers of identity, now stands empty. I’m in the process of reviewing everything that got me to this place, deciding what comes with me, but giving most of it away.
It’s happening to the whole city. This time, there’s no denying that tech has taken over my hometown. I barely recognize it, except for in the neighborhoods where gray-haired hippies maintain death grips on their aging, moldy, brightly painted houses and street corners still belong to the dogwoods and magnolias. The birthplace of Microsoft, technology always had a foothold here, but it used to look like floppy discs and DOS-prompt; today it’s AI, Amazon, and Tesla. It has taken such deep root, it seems the place is slowly being subsumed by a slowly creeping soullessness.
It took me an hour and three stops to find something, anything, in South Lake Union even resembling a quintessential old-Seattle coffee shop. Everywhere I went felt like a club, the thumping EDM bassline better suited to midnight at Burning Man than a café on Wednesday morning. I no longer recognize the landscape, getting turned around on streets I’ve walked a million times; towers practically shooting up around me, knocking seagulls off-kilter in the gray sky and obscuring the ocean.
I finally found a local chain with good beans and standardized chalkboard menus that harkened to times when the specials were daily fresh-scrawled. The Capitol Hill location was a favorite, back when it was just a tiny stand on the drag full of drag queens, littered with damp concert fliers and discarded CD singles, the scent of nag champa drifting from the open doors of thrift shops that were the only place to go when you weren’t old enough to drink and didn’t want to go home. It was frequented by fellow queirdos and out-castes, a caffeine fix for queens performing at R*Place; where the city’s unhoused proffered their community newspaper to passersby with no device to glance at averting their eyes in the drizzling night.
Today, the coffee shop looked and almost smelled the same as things did then, filled with old diner tables and chairs with cracked-vinyl seats, indie rock blaring, and a case piled high with gluten-filled pastries. My drink still cost less than $4; the baristas were still stoned, tattooed twentysomethings. The bathroom key at the counter was even still affixed to a broken coat hanger—only now, on the other end was not a key, but a plastic card that buzzed you in through the big double-doors, which opened not into a darkened hallway or mop closet, but a fluorescent-lit lobby swarming with bros in flat-brimmed ball caps taking meetings in pod-shaped vestibules.
I tried to commiserate about all the changes, but the kids slinging coffee were too young to remember anything different.
I got a coffee anyway, and spent a few hours pretending to work while cycling through the grieving process, longing for a home that no longer existed. But I also felt an awareness dawning: that perhaps this longing wasn’t so much for these places or people, but for who I was back then, in that place; with that person. Sometimes it seems like a time when things moved slower and were more certain, before a million crimson dots started screaming for my attention.
There’s something to that. In many ways, technology has made industrialized, capitalist societies much more burdened. Yet it is also driving a desperately needed, still creeping sea change. The internet and smartphones are helping to democratize publishing and mass communication, giving platforms to groups, places, and people the mainstream has too long neglected. There may be a million competing voices, but you can get yours out there, and find mutual resonance. Like any good trickster, tech can put us to sleep or awaken us, reminding us of our own abilities to create and share; to help each other heal and remember all those things that we’ve forgotten.
Nostalgia may not be a curable condition, but it doesn’t have to be a terminal illness. I think the key is to carry parts of the past that made us feel connected without getting stuck; holding memories as tender, but belonging to something that has ended.
.
The Seattle Sensory and Rose Gardens
When I left the coffee shop and wandered past the mixed-use monsters, I ran straight into a pea patch that was also a community center. Here, volunteers grow produce for the food bank while underresourced families can get outfitted and join group excursions to go hiking and visit national parks, and it made me smile. On another occasion, I wandered “by accident” into the Seattle Sensory Garden, tucked away behind the walls of fragrant roses in Woodland Park where fractal blooms shot me knowing glances. Maybe the old city hasn’t died, but is just hiding behind a new disguise, in Trickster fashion.
I hope parts of it will always survive, even as the jaws of insatiable conspicuous consumption swallow up everything where they can sink their teeth in. I hope there will always be coffee shops that smell like over-roasted apathy, where they bump discordant tunes and don’t smile at customers; where nature is protected even as the buildings rise ever-higher around it; where fresh air and stillness are treated as a right, not a privilege, and weird kids who think they don’t fit in anywhere can feel, for one brief moment, they are part of something greater.
Remnants of weird, old Seattle: the Fremont Solstice Parade; a gnome on the Naked Bike Ride