I start dreading the question in May, though it won’t be asked for another few months. Just thinking of the words, “How was your summer?” sends a chill down my spine. I’m being dramatic, but still. Perhaps it’s asked innocently enough, either because the asker is genuinely interested in how I’m doing or we don’t actually know each other that well and it’s therefore deemed appropriate small talk. But at least it isn’t, “So, what did you do this summer?” because I know then at that point they’re just asking because they want to compare summers and deem themselves the winner of summer. As if summer has a winner. “Wow! You spent a month gallivanting through Europe and got yourself a paid internship that somehow made you over ten thousand dollars?” Sounds pretty unbeatable. And it’s not like I had the worst summer ever or anything. It’s just that I know once I start comparing myself to people my age and the general trajectory of our lives in general, I am bound to drive myself crazy. 

Summer is basically one long weekend anyway. You’ve got June, which is Friday. June is full of hope and possibility and you feel like it will never end. July is thus Saturday–long and glorious but ultimately fleeting. August is a Sunday–a mixed bag, for sure. It’s scary but still promising. And by the time you convince yourself to enjoy it, you realize you have to face real responsibilities again. The point of this slightly tedious metaphor is that if there are Sunday Scaries, there must surely also be Summer Scaries.

That decisively ephemeral quality that characterizes summer is what makes it so dangerous. We romanticize it into the ground—when it’s cold in winter, while we’re drowning in school and work—and then when it finally comes around, it’s not always everything it’s cracked up to be. Some people loathe summer. They hate hot, sticky weather or living with their parents again or having way too much free time. I am not one of those people—I do think of myself as someone who longs for summer. When else would I have the time to reorganize my entire closet, set out to go to the beach every day but only go exactly twice, and make earrings out of my wisdom teeth? Yet when summer does finally arrive, I always find myself falling into that same trap of wanting it and then not knowing what to do with it once it arrives.

Perhaps summer is just another one of those fun perks that come with life at the beginning of your twenties. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing– going to school, dropping out of school, getting a job, getting married, getting pregnant– whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong. This mindset also applies to summer and can make the whole ordeal much more stressful than it needs to be. This could also just be my personal problem. It’s very possible that others have no trouble enjoying the months between May and September. 

The season in question is one that, for a long time, felt untouched by all the woes that come from living in corporate America. Summer used to be sacred. You go to school and try hard for, like, nine months in preparation for some future you’re supposedly going to have, and then you get a break. Maybe I just wasn’t ready for summer to mean something else, for summer to be a chance to “get ahead.” After all, in theory, I will be employed in some sort of way for a large fraction of my life, so why am I so anxious about “making the most of my summer” and filling it with a bunch of things that will make me just as frantic and busy as I am during the rest of the year? 

Maybe the problem has something to do with the undeniable link between summer and adolescence. Summer has certain cinematic expectations that come with it and I never feel quite capable of living up to them. You’re telling me I’m supposed to have unforgettable memories, a summer fling, and an epiphany while I watch the sun set over the ocean all in the space of three or four months? Now, wait a second, isn’t that what studying abroad is for? In all seriousness, the magic of summer makes sense. Humans are nostalgic creatures, prone to identifying moments as “the best” only after they’ve been lived and categorized as easily accessible, glorified memories. When transitioning from freedom and warm weather to homework in the cold, it’s easy to omit things from the narrative, like all the sunburns and bug bites you got or how many days you spent bored out of your mind. You could also argue that this late-summer, early-fall pessimism is simply a way of belittling summer so I don’t have to face the fact that it’s over.

I wouldn’t say I’m entirely trying to write off the importance of keeping summer magical. Summer does hold a special place in my heart and I’m grateful for all the extra time, even if sometimes it can feel like almost too much. I’m also the biggest proponent of pressuring myself to “have a great summer” and not letting it become “ruined.” This is all obviously an internal, unwinnable battle. Unwinnable partly because time and the way it works on a larger scale totally freaks me out. Because time in general would also be a herculean topic to sum up in a readable length, I have instead carved out a tiny niche about summer.

Now that school has started back up again, the cycle also restarts. As soon as you get into the “dog days” of summer– a term that has come to signify the point at which summer feels stunted—you start longing for that fresh start, first-day-of-school feeling, or at least I do. But a few weeks in, that old summer longing comes creeping back in. I know this cycle well enough now to have basically accepted it. But I have also spent many hours agonizing over how to maximize the potential of my summer while that summer is actually happening—a counterintuitive practice that stops me from actively enjoying those hours. The solution thus cannot be as simple as “live for the moment” and “enjoy the present,” right? 

Living in the present can be great, but there is something to be said for the romance of time. Languishing for a lovelier version of a memory isn’t always a bad thing, especially in the case of summer, which brings back the freedom of childhood and one day might go extinct altogether, given our exponentially multiplying responsibilities as “adults.” Starting, enduring, and ending a summer can all be tense endeavors. Or wonderful. As many coming-of-age movies have shown, the process of growing up and experiencing the glory of summer as a young adult is often an important part of our development as people, maybe especially because of the imperfections that come with it. So I think it’s okay to long for summer, as long as we don’t give ourselves too much grief over making it perfect once it actually comes around.

Emma Kendall can be reached at erkendall@wesleyan.edu.