Nostalgia Is a Liar

The old job emailed. Or the old partner liked a photo. Or you caught yourself at eleven at night scrolling back through a version of your life you fought to leave, thinking: it wasn’t that bad.

It was that bad. You have the receipts. You just filed them in the back room, behind the curtain, where you don’t go looking.

Welcome to the October pull. The year is tightening, the thing you’re building now still wobbles when you lean on it, and the thing you walked away from suddenly looks like a warm house with the lights on.

The Dead Butterfly

I call this hanging on to a dead butterfly. We cling to what’s familiar long after it stopped working, because the familiar hands us a sense of stability and security. The catch: what you’re holding is already gone. The aliveness left it a while ago.

Nostalgia is the butterfly’s PR department. It has a great marketing team and a terrible memory.

Researchers have measured this. In 1997, Terence Mitchell and three colleagues followed people through three trips: a tour of Europe, a Thanksgiving break, and a three-week bike ride across California. Everyone rated the trip before, during, and after. During the trip, the ratings sagged. Within days of getting home, the memory had climbed back up, rosier than the trip had ever been while it was happening. The researchers called it the rosy view. Your brain edits the footage. It cuts the rain and keeps the sunset.

Now apply that to a job you held for years. Or a marriage. Or the version of you who never asked for more.

The Voice That Sells You the Past

You know the sales pitch. It runs at night, usually when the new thing had a hard week.

• “It was simpler then.” It was smaller. You were smaller in it.
• “At least I knew what I was doing.” You knew exactly what you were doing, and you were miserable doing it.
• “Maybe I was being dramatic when I left.” Your body was filing complaints. Bodies are rarely dramatic.
• “Everyone I know is still there.” Everyone you know is still complaining about it, too.

Different chapter, same monologue. The script swaps the nouns and keeps the plot, the way every Hallmark romance movie does: new town, new leading woman, same ending.

The Offer I Almost Accepted

Just as I was walking away from Capital Markets, I was offered a management role. Good salary, pension, four weeks’ vacation. The kind of offer you don’t turn down. Familiar territory. I knew where every landmine was buried, which, when you’re about to build something new from nothing, feels like a free pass. For about a week I caught myself saying it: taking this role would be easier than starting something new.

Then I remembered what easier had looked like. By thirty I was a branch manager administering an eight-figure business, but I woke up most mornings with an elephant on my chest. Debilitating allergies, fibromyalgia, depression. Every external marker of success, and a body filing a complaint a day. My body was keeping score.

Years of physical therapy, psychotherapy, and counselling had helped me manage some of it. Then the right coach asked me one question: “Why can’t you just change your life?” I laughed at her. But the seed landed, I got curious, and that curiosity set the rest of my life in motion. It’s the question underneath the work I do with clients now.

What kept me from looking back was that I’d already had a taste of something bigger: a connection to my own inner wisdom, and a vision of what my life could look like that I couldn’t unsee.

I turned down the offer. And then I did the thing I’d rather not admit in print. I had left finance to stop sacrificing my life for my work. But I built a coaching practice on the back of the same pattern I thought I was leaving behind. Calendar booked months out. Hourly sessions back to back, no room to breathe between them, and hours borrowed from my daughter’s childhood so I could be available to everyone else.

Same cage. Nicer curtains.

Nostalgia doesn’t only pull you back to the old address. It pulls you back to the old pattern, wherever you happen to be standing.

What the Pull Is Protecting

The familiar is calling because your subconscious would rather have a known discomfort than an unfamiliar opportunity, every single time. Its job is safety. Safe means predictable, and predictable means whatever you already survived. It will walk you straight back into a suffering it recognizes and call the trip being realistic.

And underneath that, what a part of you yearns for is the version of you whose circumstances made the hard calls. The old life came with a script and a ready explanation: the industry, the boss, the schedule, the ex. Whatever wasn’t working, there was always something on that list to point at. The life you’re building now hands you the pen and doesn’t let the circumstances dictate your direction. Every page is yours to write. Nostalgia knows exactly how uncomfortable it can be to take full ownership of all of it.

Here’s the good news. That’s just wiring. Wiring can be rewritten, but only once you stop mistaking the pull for good sense.

It Spreads Through the Org Chart and the Group Chat

Watch what a dead butterfly does at scale. The leader who keeps a worn-out business model alive because it’s familiar trains the whole team to keep dead things alive. The offer nobody has bought since spring stays on the menu. The meeting nobody needs stays on the calendar. The hire who stopped fitting two years ago is still there, and everyone works around the butterfly rather than say out loud that it stopped moving. Loyalty to the past gets rewarded; honesty about it gets called negativity.

At home it looks like the friend group you outgrew but keep out of obligation. The relationship pattern with a new name and a new haircut, running the same script. The Sunday dinner where you shrink back into the kid who sat at that table. If you think you’ve outgrown all this, go spend a long weekend with your parents and report back.

Same butterfly, different room. The people around you learn from what you keep alive.

Check the Compass, Not the Photo Album

You didn’t choose change on a whim. It took courage. You left for freedom, for your health, for peace, or to be present for your own kid at bedtime. Those are your values, and leaving was you choosing what truly matters over perceived comfort.

Nostalgia edits the footage. Your values keep the receipts.

So when the pull shows up, don’t argue with the feeling. You’ll lose; it has a better production team than you do. Check the compass instead.

What was the last straw that walked you out the door? Most people don’t leave on principle. They leave when the pain of staying finally outweighs the fear of changing. Is that last straw any more negotiable today than it was then?

You can honour what was without returning to it. You can even be grateful for the chapter and still refuse to re-read it. What looks simpler from here is only familiar, but familiar and aligned are two different addresses.

Before You Reply to That Email

Make a list for yourself. Call it “Why Change Was Necessary.”

1. Write five lines. Specific and unflattering, the eleven-at-night version, never the one you tell at dinner parties.
2. Add a sixth: who would you have to shrink back into to accommodate that old story?
3. Keep it where you’ll find it the next time the past sends a friend request.

Then ask one question: which non-negotiable walked me out, and would going back cost me my integrity, or everything I’ve grown into since?

There is your answer. You’ve known it for a while. The decision is already made. What’s still open is how you build what comes next, and that part doesn’t have to happen alone. You’ll get there faster with someone who’s already gone the distance.

The old version of you is gone, and you’re the proof. What’s back there is a familiar pattern that will fit exactly as badly as it did the first time, with better lighting.

Next month we’ll look at the other side of this coin: the moment the road ahead has so many turns you freeze and call it confusion.

If the pull is loud right now and you can’t tell whether you’re being wise or just tired, book a Clarity Call. Thirty minutes, we name the pattern doing the pulling and your next clear step, no strings: ChatWithAnik.com.

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