Summer Scaries
Right now, the orange marigolds are dead in the corner of my room, the clothes I was going to sell in Tompkins are still in a bag in my closet, and the sun is long set at 9pm. Summer’s running out.
Growing up, summer break was the time for us to become someone new (first kiss, going on a family cruise, reinventing your style by buying Vans). It’s our opportunity to be young and social and dumb—the things that make us feel like we have plenty of time.
The pleasure of youth is the pleasure of possibility. Summer says, You can be anything! You can be a person who buys fresh produce at the farmer’s market every week. You can even be the person who uses the produce.
As I get older, the demarcation of summer gets fuzzier and the pressure of possibility gets more urgent. The years start coming and they do not stop coming.
What did I do with my summer in the city? Did I have enough fun? What happened to all those newsletters I was going to write? Can you get pre-seasonal depression? Is it too late to keep telling myself I’m going to start a windowsill herb garden this year?
I think two things are behind summer scaries. The first is that I’m afraid of dying, but let’s table that.
The other source of summer scaries is a profound and permeating addiction to becoming. There’s a Pali word for this in Buddhism, bhavatanha, which can be translated as “the craving to become (what you are not).” Christina Feldman describes it here:
"This is the endless desire to become the kind of person who only has pleasant experiences, who is admired and applauded and loved. It’s a desire to become the kind of person who is secure and safe; a person without blemish or imperfection; a person who never fails, who’s never criticized, who’s never judged."
Of course this is amplified in the summer. It’s not just the habit of preparing to unveil ourselves on the first day of school. The world around us is showing off, too, transforming into something breathtaking, vibrant, alive. Who wouldn’t want to mirror that? And so comes the 14-year-old longing to be beautiful at the summer camp dance and the 25-year-old longing for the trip or class or afternoon that makes me feel certain of my path. The desire to change is the desire to escape current suffering.
It’s no wonder we put so much pressure on summer becoming—we live in a bhavantanha-dominant time. Every time I log onto Instagram I’m giving a PSA on my life progress. Living in a state of self-improvement is assumed. Compared to summer’s hustle culture approach to pleasure, autumn’s reminders of mortality, letting go, and turning inward are a real bummer.
I know I said I was going to table the death talk, but I think I have this idea that if I keep leveling up over and over, if I get everything done that I was supposed to do, if I take advantage of every sunny, 75-degree day, if I just have a lot of FUN, then dying will be easier. When T. S. Eliot wrote, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” I don’t think he was talking about me drinking a Stella at the park to escape my mortality, but he might as well have been.
Chill out, Rachel (you’re thinking)—I just meant I wished I had finished that Gordon Ramsay MasterClass over the summer.
OK, let me get to my point already: The itch to get out of our routine, to “make memories,” is really a deep desire to push the limits of who we believe we are. All the new environments and activities don’t materially change me. They’re just triggers that allow the boundaries of my identity to dissolve a little. Oh, now I have permission to see myself as someone who has community. Who perseveres through a challenge. Who lays in the sun and for whom life is pleasurable. When I was younger, the sneaking out and blasting Seven Nation Army out of my car speakers was in pursuit of: I’m someone who is free. But I always was free.
Aspiration hurts when it’s a desire to become something we’re not, but it can help when it’s a desire to see ourselves as something we already are. This isn’t just semantics. It liberates you from thinking that ticking off everything on your summer bucket list will propel you into a new, sparkly self (one conveniently bereft of all your problems). This obviously isn’t just about summer; it’s the rest of our lives, too.
I kind of love this quote that pops up on social media sometimes (I have a soft spot for spiritually vague advice having to do with trees):
Maybe we’re not strutting into school with the dopamine of a reinvented personality anymore. But we have the chance to experiment with something more radical: being satisfied with what already is.
We can welcome autumn’s own type of loveliness (Thou hast thy music too, Keats said). And we can listen to its wisdom: that learning to let go of the desire to become is the most precious thing we could do with our time.