Welcome back! Every week, messages arrive through the contact form: thoughts, stories, and questions that travel farther than I ever imagined this page would. One of them stayed with me. It read, “Do you ever miss the person you were before you knew better?”
I have been thinking about that question more than I expected to. There is a quiet kind of mourning that comes with growing wiser, a subtle grief. We often talk about becoming better versions of ourselves, but no one tells you that “better” can sometimes feel like betrayal. You do not just leave behind bad habits or naive dreams. You leave behind the version of yourself who believed in them.
It is like returning to a lake you used to swim in as a child. The same water, the same light, yet the air feels colder now. You hesitate before jumping in, calculating the depth, the temperature, the time it will take to dry. The spontaneity is gone, replaced by something that calls itself maturity. And while the reflection on the surface looks sharper, you cannot help but miss the blur that once made everything soft.
When we know better, we begin to build fences around our possibilities. We learn which dreams are unrealistic, which people will hurt us, which ambitions are too much. And little by little, the world shrinks to a size that feels safe. In trying to protect ourselves from disappointment, we often fence out wonder as well. The older self survives, organized and prepared, but in quiet moments you can still hear the younger one knocking, asking to be let out for a while.
Maybe that is what nostalgia really is. Not only a longing for the past, but for the version of ourselves who could live in it without irony. The one who did not need proof before believing. The one who still thought effort always led to reward, love to safety, and goodness to understanding. Growing up teaches you the limits of those equations, but it never erases the wish to believe in them again.
And perhaps missing that version of ourselves is the proof that they are not gone. Maybe they are the echo that reminds us where we began, the voice that insists, even when we have hardened, that there was once something simple and unguarded about the way we saw the world. Wisdom might not be about replacing that voice, but about learning to live beside it, to carry both the dreamer and the realist without letting either disappear.
I think of it like standing at dusk: half the sky still bright, the other half already night. You cannot have one without the other. Knowing better does not mean knowing everything. It only means learning to see the light even as it fades.
Thank you for the question. And thank you, always, for reading.
Filippo
Braunstorming 