To walk back a life is to lose it; to get what nostalgia craves is loss. To have your life back would be to lose everything that unfolded and that God wants to use. Shame—what I’m calling “nostalgia in negative”—keeps looking back, too, but in a way that paralyzes, crushes, disheartens. If nostalgia romanticizes the past as bliss, shame can’t imagine a future for our past.
