I used to be obsessed with summer. So much so that for the better part of 8 years, I went so far as to make it my phone password (that is, before two separate times friends broke into my phone, a hardly difficult feat my level of security withstanding, and an act of which, given my affinity for gossip, I likely deserved).
Summer is always a time of escapism, whether physical or metaphorical. I remember drawing up elaborative bucket lists with felt markers in colors named after the scents of the season: tangerine, sea breeze, lemon. Whether I completed these activities or not did not matter, but the romanticization of all summer promised was a teenage rite of passage I subscribed to with a religious level of zeal.
There is something ethereal and hopeful about the season, especially in its beginning. I called those hot, sticky weeks in the middle of the summer “Dead July,” because not only was the humidity enough to render you immobile in front of the air conditioning unit, but the time was so far removed from the school year before and the one ahead that anything seemed possible. The predetermined rules and responsibilities that guarded the months September through June fell, and nothing seemed to matter. You could kiss the boy you had a crush on even if you weren’t invited to the parties he was, you could befriend the lifeguard after the sun set and the beach went dark, you could drive around aimlessly, your phone on silent, and no one would ask why you didn’t show up to tennis practice or why your essay was late.
My nostalgia, of course, may be a bit misplaced here. I think what I long for most is those few sweet teenage years of quasi-freedom in summer, when your biggest responsibility was the reading assignment you knew you could finish the last week of August and the sunburn cream you promised your parents you’d remember to wear. There were stacks of beaded and braided bracelets, tans in the shape of your Birkenstocks and Havaianas, and the feeling that you wished this could all last forever.
Summer as an adult, it turns out, isn’t quite as cliche and unfortunately for me, isn’t nearly as idyllic either. Long gone is that euphoric “last day of school feeling,” when every assignment has been submitted and the daylight seems to last until practically bedtime. Instead, there’s a palpable anxiety, an urgency even, to make the most out of every sunny day after 6 pm. The city empties for half its weekends and you wonder if there’s some unlocked portal to a country home you just haven’t quite cracked the code for, and instead your thighs stick to the subway seat as an indescribable scent fills the barely air-conditioned subway car. We place so much emphasis on summer in New York that its beauty nearly crumbles under the pressure. In summer, we tell ourselves that all the horrible dark days of winter, the dreary drizzles in March, the grind of your 9-5 which, against your own wishes, is sometimes really a 9-7, is worth it.
So we pledge our allegiance to Hot Girl Summer, an aspirational motto at best, and an extension of capitalism at its worst. We book our weekends out months in advance with trips in and out of the city, packing and repacking our Supergoop sunscreen, that one bikini from Frankie’s your mom let you buy, and whatever this year’s “look of the summer is:” (the Zara dress, the white linen pants you’ll likely spill on, the denim shorts from Abercrombie that will be out of style in 2 years time). We plan Happy Hours through the end of the month, rooftop barbecues that will likely be soured by the roaring summer thunder, and we convince ourselves that if we just stay out a little bit longer, just go to one more bar, the night will transform into something you’ll never want to forget.
But the truth is, nothing about this is relaxing or rejuvenating, or even, dare I say, enjoyable, at least not for longer than about the first few weeks or so. It may look glamorous on Instagram story and when the photos inevitably reappear on the end-of-summer-dump on the grid. But it’s around this time that I usually find myself run-down and weary, my skin damaged from the sun, my bank account nearly drained, my ankles ravaged by mosquitos, my tolerance for alcohol far out of whack, and my weekender bag at the verge of collapse. I scroll through my camera roll and through the Notes app list of summer activities I still keep in honor of all those bucket lists, and I wonder why most of it wasn’t really as fun as I imagined it to be.
There’s something about the weather, which, on its best days, is something we’ve waited all year for, that makes every activity fated to be a pressurized success or fairytale. Memorial Day and the Fourth of July share something with New Year’s Eve in that it is often our expectations for perfection that leave us disappointed, wishing for more. We don’t feel this way in February or in November, on the cold days when the sun sets before we even get off of work. There’s a level of acceptance to winter’s struggles, that it’s a hard season, and it’s okay if every day is not ripped from the pages of a lifestyle magazine or the videos we watch on TikTok. We’re much more gentle on ourselves in these other parts of the year. Being unhappy, anxious, depressed even, can feel stigmatized in the summer. It can make you feel like there's something wrong with you when the countless weekends of day drinking and traveling leave you feeling more disoriented than rejuvenated. When your life looks like a watercolor on the outside, it can be all the more difficult to reconcile with the fact that mental health takes no vacations, as much as many of us wish it would.
At some point as the season bends toward August, I find myself booking a trip west, to the “third rate” beach city my parents retired to, where I can at last observe summer the way I want to: on a lawn chair, in my sun hat, with a pile of books and an ice cream sandwich in hand. If you need to find me this summer, know that eventually I’ll head there. Until then, I’ll be toggling between the doom scroll of Instagram and my own self-inflicted jam-packed Google Calendar, doing my best to dismantle Hot Girl Summer and to reimagine what the long-awaited season looks like for me. Whatever summer may mean to you, I hope you too, find your beach. :-)