Summering

heat wave goodbye

Melancholy.

At least that’s the word I’ve been using. Depression feels too big. It’s more like a lull, a dip, an ebb. The last few weeks I’ve been experiencing a general undercurrent of sadness. I continue to go about my life - go to work, see friends, spend time with family - all with an asterisk of meh. It’s not crippling or debilitating. It’s functional melancholy. It’s an everyday variety.

I find myself longing for an escape hatch. A trip. A tattoo. A lover. A new experience. Something to shake me out of the humdrum. This feeling manifests as an itching under my skin.* I want for something other than what is. A new life that’s somehow just beyond the horizon of the one I’m currently living. A life with a robust acting career, more travel, published writing, better finances, healthy dating life, my own house, and lots more fun.

That longing, when left to fester, fizzles out into flatness. The angst eventually loses its steam. Apathy. No wind in my sails. Stuck, stagnant, and drained. The itch smooths out into a dull pain.

I have this fun habit of thinking about my melancholy while I’m inside of it. I turn it over, stretch it, examine it, research it, observe it, water it, feed it, and study it. It’s my very own chia pet of emotion. The pondering about this most recent bout of melancholy reminded me of a book I read earlier this year called Wintering by Katherine May. I even wrote a post about it back in February. In it the author describes winter as not only a season but a state. It’s "a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”

Winter is the noun. Wintering is the verb. It’s the way in which we move through these fallow periods of life. May looks to the ways nature moves through the season of cold. Hibernating, nesting, and resting. She posits that we get through a winter by surrendering to our impulses. No fighting. Only leaning in. Relaxing into what feels right, even when what feels rights feels a little bad.

It dawned on me that I’ve been summering the last few weeks. And I don’t mean that in the way posh New Englanders might. It’s the verb form of going through summer’s fallow period. The dog days of August have left me with marginal amounts of energy. If the temperature outside isn’t in triple digits, it’s sitting in the 90s. High humidity means the air is thick and heavy. The sun doesn’t appear bright and shiny. It appears oppressively vitriolic.

This isn’t the summer I waxed poetic over, complete with neighborhood barbecues and popsicles. It’s the summer of laying on your bed moving as little as possible. It’s the summer of TV underneath a never-ending ceiling fan. It’s the summer of indoors that never fully cool down in spite of constant air conditioning. It’s the summer of low frequency. It’s sweat and hazy fog and apathy.

While pondering over this year’s summering, I realized that perhaps I’ve always suffered from this annual affliction. Summertime seasonal affective disorder (SSAD). After all, August is my least favorite month (sorry to all my Leo readers). Always has been. It drags on longer than any other month. There’s no good holidays in sight. School starting was always a bummer and continues to be even though I’m a grown ass man who hasn’t been in a classroom in well over a decade.

The beauty in pondering and reading and growing older is that I have more tools at my disposal. I have the wisdom to know that a little sadness isn’t lethal. I have the experience to look back and say, “yeah dummy you get sad every year at this time.” And I have access to the wisdom of others like Katherine May. She would likely tell me to follow my impulse toward stillness and air conditioning. Look to the lions in the arid heat of the Sahara I can hear her say in that refined English accent. They get some food, hump for a few minutes, then spend the rest of the day in the shade telling everyone to back the fuck off.

And that’s what I’ve done, more or less. I’ve tried to be gentle with myself and allow this apathetic melancholy to simply exist. To work its way through me however it needs. I’ve watched trash tv, sat in front of my A/C unit, and told everyone to back the fuck off because it’s what felt right. Lo and behold, that appears to have worked. As the calendar mercifully flipped over to September my summertime blues have started to lift a little. A break in the heat is on the horizon and my body feels an awakening. My spirit is more buoyant.

I got through my summering.

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*This is basically my ICSSS I wrote about last week.