The Stitch and the Scream: Memory Lives in Strange Places

There is a woman in Malta — thirty-eight years old, needle in hand — who has decided that Twistees deserve to be immortalised in thread. She embroiders them onto fabric. Cisk, too. The little orange packet, the familiar blue label, the things you grew up reaching for without thinking. She sells them as souvenirs, these stitched icons, and people buy them because something in the chest recognises them before the brain does.

I find this worth sitting with for a moment. Not the craft — though the craft is lovely — but the psychology underneath it.

What she is actually doing, whether she knows it or not, is externalising what psychologists call *autobiographical memory consolidation* — the process by which the brain anchors identity to sensory objects. The Twistees packet is not a snack. It is a Saturday afternoon. It is a specific person handing it to you. It is a version of yourself that still existed before certain things happened. When she stitches it, she is not being nostalgic in the soft, harmless sense of the word. She is doing something more precise: she is insisting that those moments were real, that they count, that they do not disappear simply because the present has gotten louder.

We tend to dismiss nostalgia as weakness — a kind of emotional thumb-sucking, a refusal to inhabit the present. But the research tells a more interesting story. Studies out of the University of Southampton, continued across several institutions, have consistently shown that nostalgia functions as what they call a *social emotion* — it does not pull you backward so much as it reconnects you to a sense of self-continuity. The person who felt at home, once. The person who belonged somewhere, once. Nostalgia, in this reading, is not a retreat from identity. It is a reminder that you *have* one.

This matters enormously in a place like Malta, where the landscape itself is being renegotiated in real time — where a public consultation on an innovation centre at San Luċjan sits alongside a feast-day exhibition of sacred objects in the Gozo cathedral, where eighteen thousand people stand in Ta' Qali under a summer sky listening to Lewis Capaldi sing about loneliness, and somehow it all coexists. The sacred and the commercial. The ancient and the downloaded. The inherited and the invented. In the middle of all this, a woman is embroidering Cisk onto fabric and people are pressing their wallets open, and I think that is because we are all, quietly, trying to answer the same question: *who was I before all of this, and is that person still reachable?*

The clinical term for the inability to answer that question is *identity diffusion* — when the self has no stable core to return to, when the present keeps rewriting the past without permission. It shows up in therapy rooms as anxiety that seems sourceless, as a kind of low-grade dissatisfaction that the person cannot locate. They will often say: *I don't know what's wrong. Everything is fine.* And what they mean, if you follow the thread long enough, is: *I don't recognise myself anymore, and I don't know when I stopped.*

The woman with the needle knows something about this, even if she has never named it. She has found a way to hold the past without being held *by* it — to look at a Twistees packet and say: *this was real, I was real, and I am still the person that moment shaped.* That is not nostalgia as escape. That is nostalgia as evidence.

I am not suggesting you take up embroidery. I am suggesting you think about what objects in your life carry that weight — the ones you keep without being able to explain why, the ones that have moved through every house with you, the ones you would not mention in therapy because they seem too small. They are not small. They are the archive. They are the self, stored in the only format the body trusts.

And here is the uncomfortable part: if you cannot think of a single one — if nothing comes to mind when you ask yourself what object holds who you used to be — that absence is worth paying attention to. Not with alarm. With curiosity. Because somewhere along the way, in the effort to become who you are now, you may have quietly evicted yourself from your own history.

The needle goes in. The thread holds. Something that mattered is declared, in the quietest possible way, to still matter