it's that time of year again

I knew summer was going to be boring. I planned on it. I said to myself that without the distraction of things to do, people to be around, a busy life to live, I’d be productive. I started summer with a mental checklist of all the “self improvement” I wanted to get done. I’d meditate every day. Start taking cold showers. Ban all masturbation. Write every day. Get into a steady schedule of going to the gym and eating healthy. I’d already subscribed to some educational Youtube channels and bought some weighty non-fiction books and both seemed a productive way to spend free time. Summer, as it began, didn’t look to me like a busy itinerary, more a vague outline of ways I’d better myself.

My first week or two at home I felt rejuvenated. My busy checklist was enough to keep my mind occupied and my mood upbeat. Looking back, this was likely due to the novelty of being at home after so long away more than anything else. There’s an obvious flaw in the way I planned my summer: using a large span of nothingness and boredom to “work on yourself” and be productive is still a period of time filled with nothingness and boredom only you get a few things done. My bedroom soon transformed into a cage, my mind became busier than a city street at rush hour, my summer a trudge from one task to the next.  

At university my life is filled with people and things to do and it means I spend most of my days doing very little because I enjoy doing very little. The days go by and I’m content. But the nagging feeling that I’m not getting anything done never leaves me; the to-do list only grows. At home my parents and few others provide a relief from long-spanning sessions of solitude thus I can fill my time with being productive, or at least what my mind has tricked itself into thinking is productive. But I’ll eventually burn out on boredom, loneliness or simply a lack of spontaneity meaning nothing much productive will end up getting done.

My life is filled with mini catch-22s (although this is likely just me being dramatic). At university I spend so much time with people it becomes tiring and I start to crave time alone. At home I spend so much time alone and become so lost in my own head I start to crave time with others. It must seem like there’s an obvious solution: to put work into altering my lifestyles in both places to finding those sweet spots between socialising and time alone, productivity and fun. But these things rarely feel in my control, they’re shaped by the things around me not inside of me, as much as I’d like to kid myself otherwise.

Which all sounds very negative but I’ve enjoyed this summer. If I looked at the summer like a maths question - counting up the things I did do and things I didn’t do, things I could have been doing or shouldn’t have been doing - added and subtracted all points to give a final answer, this summer would likely come out with a low rating. But no time out of a person’s life - no summer, no holiday, no decade, no day, no hour, no minute - is a maths question. Tallying up life like that would lead a person into misery and regret. I enjoyed this summer, for all the things I have to complain about it, for all the lounging around doing nothing, I enjoyed it for reasons I doubt I could (or would want to) put into words.

I once saw depression described as the inability to picture the future. This doesn’t describe the full spectrum of depression but it perfectly translates one aspect of it. I think that’s why education becomes a refuge for so many people long after their entrance into the real world has become long overdue. Because people know what they’re doing next week and next year. I think this summer would have killed me if I didn’t know it would be ending once September comes around. But if it wasn’t ending then, even if I’d done all the same things, it would have been an entirely different summer.