The anatomy of an ending

Or how to proclaim "that part of my life is over" without making a fool of oneself

A few months ago, Roger Daltrey proudly declared, addressing the future of The Who, that he was happy that part of his life was over. If you’re a fan of rock bands, you probably know that longevity is a rare trait. Most bands either split up at some point or assure their future together by having extended breaks or hiatuses, during which members pursue other creative endeavors. That’s what the Strokes, Radiohead, and even Arctic Monkeys do. The bands are not their only medium of creative output; there’s enough room to miss each other, to try on other identities and personas.

A mainstream audience usually elects and prefers a particular persona, however. It is not merely that they want to see the band play, they want to see that one iteration of the band they fell in love with come onstage and perform their favourite songs just like they did on that iconic 2001 performance at Glastonbury. So it’s not just Arctic Monkeys, it’s AM era Alex. It’s early 00s Julian Casablancas wearing knackered converse and battered jeans. It’s The Libertines at Brixton Academy; young, passionate, chaotic.

So bands reunite. From Blur to Oasis, the 2020s will probably be remembered for its longing for something it could never quite grasp. Nostalgia has been a hit for ages, but maybe especially so after the pandemic. Recently, Fontaines DC’s Carlos and Conor rejected our generation’s cult of nostalgia when asked about the Oasis reunion.

“I couldn’t really give a shit, to be honest,” Carlos O’Connell said.

Conor Deegan III added: “I’m not excited about it, either, to be honest. I feel like we get caught in the last era – like the ’10s – and into such a nostalgic thing that we’re forgetting to make new things.”

While I am excited about the reunion, I also recognise the importance of performing newness: nobody blamed Virginia Woolf for slamming Edwardians and Victorians in “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown”, or if they did, history certainly proved her right. So while this might appear to be an essay about bands, it is rather an attempt to think about nostalgia and the way it can poison us into refusing to let go of anything, into becoming emotional hoarders.

When I was a child, I longed for the kind of friendship characters had on TV, on films, on cartoons. An unbreakable bond that would connect two souls forever. It seemed unfeasible. I had friends, later I had crushes and at one point I even had bullies. Sometimes those three categories were even a little bit blurred, but holding on to any of it seemed a bit like trying to keep sand from slipping through my fingers. People moved away, or I did, their parents asked them to be moved to a different class because they were not getting good enough grades. Sometimes they’d just stop being my friends without any explanation and I’d have to go through the excruciating chore of finding some new group to sit with during break. To some degree, I knew this was stupid because there was so much going on outside of school, but it is torture when you are forced into an ecosystem five days a week, every week, seemingly forever. Those people are a significant chunk of your world, like it or not.

I became friendly, rather than friends, with this one particularly vicious group of girls who at one point demanded I’d prove my allegiance to them by allowing the leader of the pack to copy my answers during a test. I said fine, whatever. But this heaven-sent angel of delight expected me to tell her the answers. Out-loud. During the test. It was like they were getting their antics from some ridiculous Nickelodeon show with slime and physical comedy. And that was disheartening because what on earth was I doing wrong? That’s not the type of friendship people wrote movies about.

Then when I was fourteen I had two formative experiences. I fell in love for the first time, and I found a new best friend. Those two boys shaped my ideas of love for a long time. And maybe they reorganised my expectations around it. Neither of the relationships was perfect, far from that. Both of them hurt me in a serious way and looking back I realise I hurt them too. But accepting and understanding those two as my ground zero became a kind of super power to the woman I am today. Getting to a point where I can look back at those relationships with fondness, but without nostalgia was not easy at all.

For a good while, I embraced some unhealthy friendships because I was unwittingly recreating - or trying to recreate - the connection I had with that one boy. Who was toxic, that word we overused so much that it is all but devoid of any meaning, but was also a kindred spirit, someone who made me laugh, who understood me, who truly saw me. It ended, it definitely did, but that was worth my time. It was worth getting my heart broken. But it was certainly not worth recreating forever.

It is not always that you can look at a person from across the room and they will instantly know what you have in mind, communicating a response without saying anything. The people I tried to recreate that magic with were similar to him in some of the worst ways. He was my best friend, but he could also be careless of me, unfeeling, cold. Because he struggled with himself, he would sometimes make sure you felt inadequate as well. We were all kids then, but I can see that clearly now and that because I loved him so much, because I was nostalgic for that connection while I knew it was lost forever into adulthood, I became a bit careless of myself as well, accepting half-hearted friendship because it seemed like the mature thing to do.

So I suppose the question for today is: when do you let go? When is it that you can safely say, I am happy to say that part of my life is over. When is it truly over, to the point that staying in the same place would give you nothing but a barren experience, one powered exclusively by nostalgia?

There is no good answer. I have let many people go in my life. Sometimes all it takes is to let it take its course. If you simply make no effort, you’ll probably never see each other again. You’ll have nothing to talk about. Sometimes, though, you need to actively cut all contact with someone. It could be a family member, a friend, a partner. There are so many reasons behind that, but the truth is always, always subjective. Some people might support your choice, others might criticise you for it. But you will know.

In her most vulnerable moment, Fleabag asks the Priest to tell her what to do. It is exhausting to rely exclusively on yourself because we are always told there is some greater authority, either human or divine. Sometimes the only source for the right answer is yourself though, your only measure of the next thing you must do is your own body, your mind, your gut feeling. You need to trust it in the same way you trust you will wake up in a brand new day when you close your eyes and fall asleep. Isn’t that a bit terrifying? You close your eyes, go someplace else where reality is either extraordinary or grotesque, a haven or a personal hell; you live through all that only to realise none of it truly counts. But then you have a new chance, a new opportunity to change everything or to at least take a step towards that.

Being alive demands so much faith out of us it is not a wonder we hang on to things we know. But Carlos and Conor are fundamentally right. You need space to create something new. It could be art. It could be the future. It takes some measure of sacrifice, maybe of the past, maybe of what you know, to find something new, some special thing that cannot be found when you cower behind the lovely things nostalgia provides you with.

So my question for you this week is: are you letting go or hanging on?