Amnestalgia: Purposeful Amnesia for Nostalgic Reasons

Amnestalgia [am-nee-stal-juh] noun: 

A wishful desire to erase memories of past events or experiences to relive them again as if for the first time.

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Have you ever wanted to forget an event or a person? Have you ever wanted to relive it all over again for the first time? I have. All the time. So much so that I made up a word to describe the feeling. The people who know me, know that I am a huge movie fan. I love to watch films for entertainment and to “get away,“ but they also know that I can watch the same movie repeatedly without getting bored. Yet, there are times where I wish I didn’t know the plot twist or the ending to be able to experience every emotion all over again – the suspense, the “will they, won’t they,“ the mystery. Nothing impacts a person like watching their favorite movie for the first time. And, personally, I would give anything to forget my favorite movies.

Have you ever considered that forgetting about something or someone might not be a bad thing? When most people want to forget an event or a place, it’s because it was a bad or embarrassing memory. But have you ever wanted to re-experience something or re-visit somewhere again for the first time? It recently happened to me. When a cousin came to visit my family and I in Orlando last week, we went to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. My sister and I had been there less than a year ago, so the park was still relatively fresh in our memory. But my cousin had never even been to Orlando, much less Walt Disney World. Everything to her was new and mind-blowing, especially Pandora – The World of Avatar. I still saw it as amazing but not in the same way it took my cousin’s breath away the first time she or any of us saw it. I, instead of taking it all in again, turned to look at her reaction of laying eyes, for the first time, on this fantasy world come to life. This was neither the first nor the last time I did this that day at the park.

Most of the time, if not all the time, we want to forget certain people because they have hurt us in some sort of way. But, what if we could forget someone to meet them and get to know them all over again. To become best friends again. To fall in love again. To discover why they are who they are again. Instant connections are extremely hard to come by, especially if you are the rarest personally type (I am an INFJ but that’s for another post). So, imagine being able to experience that for the first time again. I know it sounds weird, but I personally love getting to know people and finding out how they came to be.

Maybe you have never thought about how forgetting could be a positive thing. But maybe now you’ll look around in your life and see things you will want to experience for the first time again. Or maybe you think that that’s focusing on the past and people should just move on. Either way, we should enjoy the little and big moments, places, and people in life because, regardless of how much we wish we could, we can’t control moments passed. We can only control our reaction and our emotions, at this moment, a first time.