Summer has a strange way of throwing light on what is missing, or on what we have not yet managed to achieve. Idealised images on social media of beaches, relationships, friendships, islands, hotel rooms and sunsets. And not only on social media — friends and colleagues are also waiting to hear about our summer plans.
And somewhere among all this, a feeling can appear that we rarely admit to: summer melancholy. A sense that we will not get to live the carefreeness, the ease, the rest, the experiences that other people are living. That we will be left behind. That we will have no story to share, either with others or with ourselves. Looking for material on this feeling, I found almost exclusively texts about the melancholy of returning from holiday. We speak far less about that other melancholy, the one that can appear before or during the summer, while everyone around us is leaving, meeting up, falling in love, resting — and we feel we are being left behind.
“Where are you going on holiday?”
It is a question many people ask with good intentions, almost mechanically. But for someone who will not be planning a holiday, that question can carry weight, or even shame, or feelings of loneliness and isolation. Because we do not always feel there is room for the answer “nowhere” without also feeling we have to explain why. Why we have no group of friends, no partner, no summer house, no money for a trip. As though the question becomes an invitation to justify our life.
When we constantly hear other people organising their holidays, or see their plans on social media, we may unwittingly begin to compare our lives. Not only in terms of where we are going, but in terms of where we stand in our lives overall.
“Other people have friends and I don’t.”
“Other people can get away and I can’t.”
“Other people are living experiences and I’m working.”
“Other people have a partner and I’m on my own.”
And in this way, the summer holidays can turn, inside us, into a deeper message about where we stand in life more broadly: everyone else is living and I am falling behind.
So often what weighs on us is not so much the absence of a holiday as what that absence seems to say about us. The shame that can hide behind “I’m not going away” may carry the message that something is wrong with us, with the choices we have made. We may feel inadequate. Less successful. Less sociable. As though we have not managed to build the life we would have wanted. Exposure through social media can make this experience even more intense.
And without realising it, we compare our whole reality with a selected fragment of someone else’s. It is even harder when we see a life that is not simply different from ours, but looks like the life we would like to have.
And perhaps the hardest comparison is not, in the end, with other people, but with a version of ourselves. With the one we once imagined we would be at this age, or with what our parents achieved, or with what they dreamed for us: more friends, a relationship, a family, financial ease, freedom and lightness.
Then the pain may not be only about not having gone away, but about everything we are afraid we will never have.
“What if I have fallen behind?”
Perhaps this is, in the end, the deepest question hiding behind summer melancholy.
What if I have fallen behind? Behind my peers? Behind my friends or my family? Behind what I imagined my life would be?
Because summer has a way of making deeper differences visible. People travel, meet up, live more lightly. And when we cannot take part, we may feel that we are standing outside life and watching it happen — either in real life or from behind a phone screen.
But someone being on an island in August does not mean they are “ahead” of us in life.
Someone having a large circle of friends does not mean they do not feel lonely.
Someone staying in a luxury hotel in the Cyclades does not mean they are more rested, or that they are necessarily living that particular moment more meaningfully.
And someone photographing the sunset with their partner does not mean their relationship is more authentic or deeper than ours, the one we will come home to.
And our not being able to get away in the summer does not mean we have failed.
There is something almost self-evident in the idea that summer is the season of holidays. That we ought to go to the sea, or ought to leave the city, or rest, travel, go out, live.
And perhaps this expectation is older than we think.
For many of us, summer has been connected since childhood with the end of the school year. School finishes and life can finally begin. We leave the city, we go to the village, the summer house, the island, the sea. There is a clear transition: the boring, tiring routine is over and the carefree life begins.
Perhaps this is why, even as adults, we sometimes carry that sense that we “ought” to be doing something.
As though there were an invisible pressure telling us that somewhere within the summer months we must live carefree, beside the sea.
It can be difficult to accept different needs — that we might simply want to stay in, find a cool room, sleep a little longer and do nothing. In a season that seems to be telling us exactly the opposite. In summer we are supposed to go out more, see people, swim, travel, fill our days with experiences.
So what is a holiday, really?
Perhaps it is worth pausing on the word itself. What does “holiday” mean? Is it simply a trip to another place? Or is it, literally, a break from what we do for the rest of the year? If so, then a holiday can be far more than a plane ticket, a hotel room or a beach on an island. We do not need to change place in order to change, temporarily, our relationship with time. Perhaps, then, a small “break” is not only about where we are, but about how we exist where we are.
It might be sleeping without an alarm.
Waking up without something we immediately have to catch up with.
Wandering through side streets with no particular destination, without checking the time.
Reading a book without feeling that we are “wasting time”.
Taking a route we never take.
Sitting somewhere on our own, having a coffee and simply watching people (personally one of my favourite small practices). Being there without having to do anything else, and without thinking about what we have to do next.
Perhaps, then, what we sometimes need is not so much to get away as to interrupt. To interrupt, for a while, the same rhythm, the same thoughts, the same obligations, the same route, the sense that we constantly have to keep up with something.
And perhaps this interruption can happen even if we stay in the same city.
There is no single right shape for a summer
Perhaps we need to allow ourselves to loosen a little from the idea that there is one particular way to live the summer.
We do not have to create memories every summer that will help us survive the next winter.
We do not even have to be carefree because it is summer.
This may be a difficult period. We may be working more. We may be trying to get back on our feet financially. We may be going through a lonely time. We may have no one we want or are able to travel with, or we may need to stay in the city to care for someone.
Perhaps, in the end, the point is not to convince ourselves that “it doesn’t matter that I didn’t go on holiday”.
It is to be able to look at our life without constantly measuring it against the lives of others.
To be able to say:
“This is my life at the moment. It is not the life I might want in every area. But I do not have to be ashamed of it.”
We are not falling behind because for a while we cannot keep up with other people’s pace.
And perhaps there is something deeply relieving in remembering that we do not have to prove that we are living by posting a photograph from somewhere beautiful.
Sometimes summer is an island.
Sometimes it is a few hours in the shade with a book, or with music.
Sometimes it is getting soaked with the hose on the balcony, or watching the formations of the birds that pass at this time of year.
Sometimes it is the sense that we do not have to leave the city in order to give ourselves permission to rest.
Perhaps rest is also something else: letting ourselves wander a little without hurrying. Allowing ourselves to think different thoughts. Reading something we would not read during the year. Walking with no particular destination. Doing something differently from the way we do it the rest of the year.
Perhaps, in the end, what we need in summer is not to escape the life we are living, but to interrupt the usual way we exist and experiment with how else it could be.
To slow down. To wander. To notice. To be a little bored. To do something with no purpose. To listen to a need that, in the rush of the rest of the year, we never have time to hear.
We may not have the means to get away, but we always have, if only for a while, the possibility of stepping out of the same way we live every day.
