Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!1
I’m Heather Marie, the chief curator (or as I like to say, nostalgia artist) of this newsletter, the Museum of My Nostalgia.
I have always loved looking at the past, not just the great history in textbooks, but the social, cultural, and personal history that helped shape me into the person that is typing these words. My interest in memories spans as long as I can remember; I document my life and our world so I can cling to them as long as possible. I have an extensive archive of photos, physical and digital, of moments big and small. Of people alive and gone. Of silly signs, landmarks, landscapes, cute dogs, evocative artwork, Fenway Park. I have a large Rubbermaid keepsake box full of old school projects, hilariously terrible short stories I wrote in childhood, high school drama club reviews, awards, and mementos of past versions of myself. These are the first inorganic things I would save in an emergency.
I, like all of us, am constantly evolving. So why am I so concerned with keeping track of the older Mes? Comfort.
The idea for this Substack came to me during a conversation with my partner where I asked him if he could curate his own museum, what would it be.2 Mine was a nostalgia museum, chock full of objects from our past that unlock fuzzy memories of a different time, like the Zack Morris cell phone or a Skip-It or Reebok Pumps. But this museum wasn’t just a collection of antiques (I hate to think of objects from the 80s and the 90s as antiques but here we are), it was interpretive: how do these objects explain who we are as a culture, what was happening in the zeitgeist, and how do they represent the people that held them dear?
Museums like this do exist, take the the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle or the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York. My favorite is the Museum of Childhood, a long-gone museum in a small house in New Hampshire run by a few older women who loved sharing with visitors how childhoods had grown since one-room schoolhouses. I went a handful of times as a child and then in my late teens. I loved the objects and how they were thoughtfully arranged to share a narrative of growth and culture. It felt comfortable.
But this museum is different, not just because this one is made of words (if you have the start up capital for a brick & mortar, slide into my DMs), but because it’s my nostalgia. The subjects of my nostalgia can also be yours (I mean, most older millennials have warm feelings about Nickelodeon in the 90s), but the memories are mine. My memories can relate to yours, and to the world at large. This is what I intend to do. I am going to dive into something nostalgic and share my connection to it, but also make sense of why we feel this nostalgia.
Memory and nostalgia are of course different beasts. Memories are automatically imprinted and run the spectrum between elation and horror. Nostalgia is purposeful and specifically wistful of happier times. But one cannot have nostalgia without memory nor memory without nostalgia. This to me is comfort; nostalgia is inherently comfortable.
I should say here that I can only write from my own experience and anecdotal evidence, plus a few cultural studies here and there. I am firmly a millennial–the generation I believe to be exceptional–and my views are filtered that way (I’ll get into this in a different post). I will try not to make sweeping generalities or speak to things outside of my experience, but if I do, call me in. If you don’t recognize yourself in my words, that’s ok! I want to hear from you about your memories and how these pieces of nostalgia hit you differently.
Together, let’s create a community of nostalgia artists. I’m looking forward to remembering with you!3
Be forewarned: I like musical theater.
His was neuroscience. We are different people.
I promise this Substack will not be full of time puns, but there will be plenty of pop culture references; see: my greeting.
Yay! So excited for this! Also, in a funny way my Substack is sort of a museum of my own brain (so kind of a museum of neuroscience).