September
It was long! It was short! It was sweet and oh so bitter!
I'm in a transitory phase of my life, closing chapters and starting new ones. The perfect coming of age arc. I am also doing a lot of therapy, which is mostly draining, boring, sometimes wonderful, and ultimately rewarding.
I have always disliked the month of August, it feels redundant, and in this climate economy, far too hot to do anything. In fact, I feel confident in declaring that the peak of summer is June. I crave autumn by July 31st and come August, I am putting on my boots and plaid skirts. I express summer fatigue through adapted autumn dressing, wearing Peter Pan collars, gingham and Mary Janes.
The anticipation of autumn is wonderful because it provides the reassuring inevitability of structure, shedding the sins and habits (or lack thereof) taken on in the summertime. Adults may diagnose me with the virus of my generation, the inability to live in the moment! Its these smartphones! But I think I just simply cannot sit still, both physically and in my thoughts. My nature pushes me to plan compulsively, and I am very rarely spontaneous. But I find immense comfort and excitement in planning and looking forward to something. I think part of that excitement is simply relief at the certainty of life’s cyclicality. Or maybe it’s seasonal amnesia, forgetting that autumn, too, has its downsides. Coupled with that, I am also guilty of idealising the future, as opposed to enjoying the end of summer. Instead of leaning into the comfort of knowing that summer will come to pass, I lean into my unrealistic expectations for what comes next. My anticipations have soundtracks, moodboards, and in my mind people are as interesting as characters in novels. But real life isn’t that way, and a lot people suck and have goldfish-like complexity! So when life fails to deliver on my imagination, I move on to plan whatever is next. The endless anticipatory cycle.
Something about the arrival of autumn is witchy to me. Gloom and glow coexist, and I'm not always sure whether it is a wonderful time, or whether winter sadness is setting in. Already anticipating Christmas time sadness. By the end of summer, my family loosely decides where we will spend Christmas, and I find out where I will be, when I experience the deep trenches of nostalgia and hopeful escapism by scrolling the spring fashion collections.
This September I’ve felt all the feelings. And for once, I think they were “conventionally” justified. You just read about my conventionally “unjustified” feelings, i.e. abnormal levels of nostalgia, unprompted sadness, and spoiled girl levels of impatience. I say conventionally/ unconventionally because, while I think that all feelings are justified (come to me for advice and I’ll empower all your unreasonable emotions!), I don’t think that is the norm, or necessarily healthy. This was the first September, probably since early childhood, that I did not “go back to school” (though it did not prevent me from buying new stationary). Summer crawled by like the Stone Age and I had promised myself kindness and space to figure my life out. I could hardly wait for my new life to start, lists were made and goals were set. I had my ideas (that have since been scrapped and updated) and was determine not to rush into what everyone else thought I should be doing. That’s the thing about being the youngest child, isn’t it? Everyone feels entitled to an opinion, and the virtue of age legitimises even the most irrelevant of opinions. But thankfully, I only minimally internalised these expectations before rejecting them entirely.
Of course, come September 1st, instant nostalgia and anxiety set in and all the hypothetical kindness towards myself had evaporated. Imagery and words of failure haunted me! And the gloom of autumn leaves only seemed to reinforce the sadness and existential dread that is always ready to come and play.
September also birthed a new emotion in myself (gasp, not another one!).
It was the first time I had felt anger. This bout of anger, made me realise that I had been a fool! All the other presumed angers were not it! These feelings were actually feelings of injustice, frustration, or point blanc sadness - all of which, I found, pair wonderfully with anger.
Who knew anger was so infuriating????
This has for the moment eased my longing for school because it showed me that I could simply be a scholar of life! I was learning and experiencing new emotions at the ripe age of twenty-three.
And so, I ride through the autumn gloom into a new month with yet another variable to my mental state. Maybe there will be more anger or a new emotion to report next week.