Saturday nostalgia hit me hard (reflecting)

I came back home to the Chicagoland area Saturday and my girlfriend and I are going back to Indiana today. Amongst other things, I drove around and showed her my neighborhood and the different places I went to school.

I got rather nostalgic when I drove past my high school I went to. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, yet it’s been 16 years since I graduated and this year will be 20 years since I was a freshman.

I look back, and I think how I had a lot of growing up to do, I didn’t know as much as I thought I did - neither of which I knew at the time. If I went back and did high school now as my current self or if I could go back and do it again knowing then what I know now, it’d be a drastically different experience. I wanted to be famous then. Now, I prefer to live a quieter life and most people just leave me alone.

Do I miss some of the times? Absolutely. Do I miss the world as it was? More than you know. I do not miss the person I was. This also applies to who I was as a kid, because I have a severe case of childhood nostalgia, but look back and cringe on who I was as a person and how socially awkward I was for much of my life. I still am socially awkward, just not to that extent.

I do know I’m glad I was a kid/teenager then and not now. Kids can be mean and vicious - and I know they were that way when I was younger. No way would I want to be a kid now in a world of smartphones, social media and AI.