Dear Travel Itin:

“How can I cope with this emotionally?” –

– I’d say, for the purpose of coping with this, you need to better define what this is.

“I have always looked back at the past… and reminisced about the heydays” – if you always reminisced, it means that you reminisced before the pandemic (and then maybe you reminisced more during the pandemic)?

“It hurts me to keep recollecting the past, when everyone else seems to have moved on respectively” – if your past was pleasant enough overall, you would have moved on from it.  But there is enough unpleasantness in your past that keeps you stuck in it. Maybe the “this” which you need to cope with is that unpleasantness.

It is possible that by being nostalgic about the past, you’ve been avoiding confronting some difficult, unpleasant things about your past, a confrontation that needs to happen so that you can move on…?

anita