Is Nostalgia Contagious?

"Is nostalgia contagious?"

It's a valid question, isn't it?  I mean, what is nostalgia?  And if you spend your whole life looking back on what used to be, what is usually the motivation for it?  Wishing you could go back or wishing you could forget? Today I had one of those moments where I thought it would be a good idea to go back and read over my Livejournal, which covers a span of 2004 to 2013 since I haven't (to my recollection?) updated this year.

I started at the beginning and wanted to see what was going on.  Turns out I spent a lot of time either angry or trying too hard to fit in.  I found a "Which OC Character are You?" quiz result thing that makes more sense to me now than it ever did back when I got the results 10 years ago.  Last summer, I went through a stage where I had some pretty severe nostalgia, or something.  This is probably why I started at the beginning of my LJ life and worked forwards, instead of starting newest to oldest.  But what's weird is how it's hard to come to grips with everything.  1) "How have I changed over the past 10 years?" and 2) "How have I remained the same?" which leads to "Am I happy with the progress of my life?"

One thing I realized is that there are some things that I really miss, but not very many people I miss.  I look back and see things that used to amuse me like "word of the day" and "Mikey's Funnies" which I still get e-mails today for both but I never take the time to read them, in fact I think they go to Spam if they even get e-mailed at all.  I see what I can best describe as social experiments and can't even remember how I got involved in them or why it seemed like some of the things I did made sense, let alone seemed like a good idea. Ultimately, it was about acceptance.

So why do we do it?  Why do we go back and relive the past?  Especially the ridiculously horrible, horrifying, and unpleasant aspects?  I'm happy to say I really don't think I'm socially the same person I was 10 years ago, but I am more than likely kidding myself. But I know that there are some very precious diamonds that have shown through the coal of my past.  And they say "everything happens for a reason." Some of the things in my life right now could not have ever been possible if I wouldn't have been exposed to the toxins that poisoned my adolescence. I wouldn't have gotten a livejournal, I know that much.  And there are at least four people who were introduced to my life through livejournal that have made an incredible shift in my growth.  These people will never know what they lured me away from with their positive influences.

I suspect that nostalgia is the puzzle piece that keeps us from burning our own bridge. So that we always know where we came from.  We don't have to follow the lead of Gob Bluth and use "forget me now" to burn our bridges.  It's probably easier to put up detour signs than burn bridges anyways. So maybe that's it?