Last Michaelmas, as my friends and I were going through our photos from a weekend trip to Bristol, Bath, and Cardiff, my friend said: “When I look at these photos, I feel nostalgia for time that isn’t over yet.” This comment stuck with me, and I have found it to ring increasingly true the more time I spend in Oxford. As my camera roll fills up with photos from formals, balls, BOPs, and ordinary days just spent revising with friends, I can’t help but feel a twinge of sadness every time I go through it. Given that I am only a second-year undergraduate, this melancholy feels premature and out of place. While it certainly still lingers during term time, I feel my nostalgia for Oxford truly reached its peak in the last long vacation, and has only grown as my year abroad draws scarily close. Ultimately, this nostalgia is due to a combination of distance and distorted memories, framed through the lens of social media and selected photos.
We all know the bittersweet end-of-term feeling, when the last essay has been submitted, your room is packed, and you are ready to go home. When you open Instagram, your feed is flooded with digicam ‘photo-dumps’ captioned “michael-mess”, “hellary”, or “trinifree”. Swiping reveals a series of formals, parties, and general merriment taking place across a variety of friend groups. Your heart swells at the thought of all the fun times you had last term as you prepare your own ‘photo-dump’. I myself am guilty of the overly sentimental, highly curated Instagram post (though they are often nine months late). Through such colourful carousels, we are offered a highlight reel of the term – a glimpse of only the best moments. When I first post, though, my feelings do not necessarily reflect the version of term I present on my social media. Although I already miss the fun times with my friends, I am also exhausted from the previous term, and thoroughly ready for a break. When I look at my highlight reel in this context, all I can see is the absence of all-too-recent essay crises and deadlines passed.
On reflection, it seems that these types of posts have the greatest impact on me a few weeks into the long vacation. Once the dust has settled, and I have fallen back into my daily routine at home, I find myself spending more and more time staring longingly at my term-time photos. Originally taken in the context of Oxford chaos, they now stand independently, as images of a more exciting time with friends, and the nostalgia this evokes is only exacerbated by the warm, familiar glow of the digicam. These photos look older than the ones taken on my phone (I am a shameless digicam leech in my friend group), and thus, almost feel as if they come from a more distant time. Not only do our digicamposted memories recall the best, hand-picked moments, they do so in a way that covers our experiences in a romantic haze. It is no secret that Oxford lends itself extremely well to romanticisation, and the combination of distance, lack of context, and blurry analogue media only serves to heighten this longing. It seems that, as Oxford becomes more remote, my feelings towards my university experience become less accurate. The breakneck speed of term is forgotten in favour of remembering the times spent ignoring work in favour of more lively pursuits. In short, as soon as August hits, my rose-tinted glasses are decidedly on.
I have spent some time contemplating this feeling as I prepare to leave Oxford for a year. This looming departure makes this the last term my college wife and I will spend as students together, and my last overlapping term with many of my closest friends. As I feel the same nostalgic emotions swelling up much earlier this time around, I really start to feel that the depiction of Oxford in the photos I post is misleading. I wonder whether, in my preservation of the best parts of Oxford, I have done my real experience an injustice. While I love and cherish the fun and beautiful parts of Oxford, it would be a lie to say that the stress and challenges were any less of a fundamental part of my experience here. When so much of my time is spent at a desk in a library, it almost seems unfair to my past self to forget those moments. The rose-tinted glasses seem to have selective blinders attached to them.
Yet I think the solution to my problem might come in the form of better documentation. While my camera roll provides ample material for yearning, my saved snaps with my sister offer a very different version of the term. There, I can observe a museum of library sessions, essay crises, and the generalised academic chaos that accompanies the term. Without concern for external perception, these photos are taken live, and offer far better contextualisation for the ups and downs of Oxford. Although I sometimes expect to be brought down by the resurfacing of such memories, the resulting feeling is surprisingly much more optimistic. In forgetting the chaos of term, I think we tend to also forget our achievements within the eight-week period. The sudden shift in circumstance, environment, and sometimes even time zones can often distract from the challenges that we each managed to overcome, and the projects we’ve completed within such a short period of time. Distance from these varied experiences, combined with a more accurate recollection of them, has allowed me to appreciate what I have learned, and achieved, throughout my time here. I can cherish my weekend trip to Wales with my friends, recall the stressful week of catch-up that ensued, and appreciate the increase in my writing speed that I gained as a result. Thinking about all the times I have scrambled to finish writing before going out for the evening has allowed me to value the balancing act of managing work and fun that Oxford demands, and makes me excited to continue this in my final year.
Of course, this isn’t to say that compilations of happy memories stored on digicams or posted online are always harmful to us. As I mentioned, I love to dump digicam photos of myself at balls on my Instagram (what else is the app for?). However, I do think that recontextualising my nostalgia, and reflecting on the more challenging times of term, when I have more space and time, has been incredibly beneficial to my relationship with Oxford. As I look forward to the last two weeks of term before I set off on a year abroad, I want to preserve these slightly challenging and conflicting feelings. I think they are what allow us to cherish our true experience of Oxford.
