I often think about the way things were. No, not like a fleeting thought crossing my mind, but a persisting feeling. Something that never goes away, despite any efforts to push it back down. Despite the permanence of memories, specifically bittersweet ones, I think we all define ourselves by learning from the past. We keep moving forward by having a starting point.

You’d think that as someone content with her college choice and future goals, it would be easy to forget about high school and eagerly anticipate the decade of my 20s. But despite the hopefulness for my future, I can’t tell you how upsetting it makes me to realize that I will soon no longer be a teenager.

There are people like me who are and will always be old souls, and for people like that, being a teenager means something different than it would for most others. My teenage years were defined by deep thought and poetry and curiosity and thoroughly obsessing over good music and being a romantic in every sense of the word. The short drives to rural, small-towns of central New York, reading whatever books I wanted for fun before bed, the feeling of being in love.

I enjoyed being young because of the process of creation and failure and learning and becoming the person I am today. And even though those things can be found at any moment in life, the process of moving on from being a dreamer and transitioning into a more serious adult world holds more significance than most other moments in time.

If, however, we experience nostalgia for a time in which we never existed, like the 70s or 80s which were truly grand in their own ways but still had their setbacks, I think that says a lot about admiring certain parts of the past in hopes of them occurring again in the future. And although we can never repeat the past, the beauty of nostalgia is that we gain inspiration from it to create an even better future, an even better version of ourselves.

It took me years, but I finally understand what Fitzgerald meant by: “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Life is advancing; we are all moving forward whether we want to or not. But, like all ships at sea, it is the waves from the past that push us even farther ahead on course.

In that sense, I really do believe it’s beneficial to always look to the good, or even bad, parts of the past with a sense of appreciation and a sense of longing not to go back, but to progress. It’s safe to say it has taken me a while to learn the importance of moving forward and not looking back in regret, but when I allow it to happen, that’s where freedom is found.

So we’ll keep changing, and we’ll eventually graduate college and feel nostalgic for this moment as well, and we’ll keep heading out to new horizons with the wind from the past at our backs as we embark on new adventures. And every time we tell ourselves, “Ugh, I want to go back,” what we really want is something better ahead of us.