I’ve been thinking about how long it takes before an experience becomes nostalgic. For me, the threshold seems to be around five years. I’m 29 now, in 2025, and I don’t feel any nostalgia for 2024, 2023, 2022, or even 2021. Those years feel too recent and—if I’m honest—mostly embarrassing. But nostalgia starts to show up around 2020, 2019, 2018, and then it stretches all the way back to 1999, when my earliest memories formed.

This made me wonder whether nostalgia is actually a marker of internal change—some sign that I’ve crossed a psychological boundary and become someone different from the person who lived those earlier years. The funny thing is, the recent years (2021–2024ish) don’t feel like my “current chapter” either, because I have changed, especially in how I act in relationships. But instead of feeling nostalgic for those versions of myself, I mostly feel embarrassed by them.

One idea is that embarrassment might be the first stage of leaving a past self behind, while nostalgia is the stage that comes later, when there’s enough distance to look back more fondly. When the old tendencies are still close—when their voice still echoes in my inner world—it’s almost as if another person is still living in my mind. Only after enough time passes do those tendencies drift far enough away to feel like someone outside me, someone I can remember with warmth rather than discomfort. Just as we have memories of things and events, it seems we also have memories of “what it means to be me”—a particular sense of inhabiting my Cartesian theater rather than anyone else’s. Those memories seem to come in segments: one segment can feel nostalgic about another, and when two segments haven’t fully detached and briefly overlap, that’s when the embarrassment shows up.

I’ve started calling these segments of past self “ghosts”: discrete, finite, and enumerable chapters of my identity that linger after they’ve gone.

The most recent ghost, the one fading as I write this, lived from 2021 to 2025. He was lonely, a bit pretentious, socially outgoing in a contrived way, and hesitant with his emotions. Before him was the 2018–2020 ghost—self-centered, fussy, socially unnatural. Before that, the 2016–2018 ghost—proud and arrogant. Before that, the 2013–2016 ghost—fearful, obsessive, overly attached to parents. Earlier still was the 2011–2012 ghost: funny, curious, easygoing—probably the best of them. And behind that, the childhood ghost: insecure, afraid of teachers, but also warm, protected, and quietly confident thanks to a few kind adults.

Most of these ghosts were flawed—some even unpleasant. Yet the new ghost emerging in me now feels familiar. He resembles the 2011–2012 version of myself, but this time he feels more grounded and stable, not as fragile as he was at sixteen.

It feels a bit like returning to an earlier operating system—one that existed before all the compensatory and performative identities layered themselves on top of it—but now upgraded, debloated, and more stable.