Maybe Lana was Right: The unexpected sadness that comes with summer

When you live and study in St Andrews, seasonal depression can easily be a yearly fatality. With its consistent grey skies and lack of buzzing urban energy, it’s easy to catch a case of the blues. Temperatures do gradually increase, and by the time April rolls around, we’re reminded of the warmer, significantly less gloomy, and highly-anticipated four-month stretch that follows: summer. But if you’re anything like me — in your twenties, have chalked up all professional pursuits to the unfortunate fate of being a writer, and wholeheartedly believe in the notion that “habit is a great deadener” (as written by Samuel Beckett) — summer poses the greatest potential risk of seasonal sadness. 

It’s easy to get swept away with expectations for the warmer months ahead — the promise of soon-to-be-planned holidays, free time to read that one book that’s been collecting dust on your nightstand and spirited reunions with your hometown friends. But what happens once you’ve actually made it home? Four months of empty time stand before you, and after months of scheduled lectures and meticulously crafting outfits for various Fixr events, you’ve found (in your older age) that you can hardly keep up with the spontaneous quality of summer fun. 

Living at home comes with its own adjustment period after being able to go where and when you please while at university. But the second you’re under your parents’ roof again, the freedom you once had to satisfy your sugar craving at 11pm vanishes into thin air. You haven’t needed to answer the ‘where-are-you-going’s and the ‘what-time-will-you-be-back’s since school. Of course, it’s perfectly logical that your parents allow you to spend four years unsupervised in a town far away from home only to insist that you continue sharing your location with them the second you cross into the shared area code for the summer. 

Semesters also provide some sort of routine, whereas summer provides the complete opposite. Sleeping until noon loses its novelty once your bedtime gets later and later. Every day starts to feel the same: wake up at an ungodly hour, lay in bed, eat when you’re hungry, consume various forms of media, go to bed at an even more ungodly hour, and repeat. That coveted summer holiday starts to feel comparable to Sisyphus’s never-ending curse of pushing a boulder up the side of the mountain day in and day out. So you turn to the cheapest thrill of entertainment made readily available: scrolling on your phone. But despite your vocabulary full of internet-isms and the parasocial friendships with nepotistic micro-celebrities, social media may only serve as a reminder that, in fact, you’ve passed your time very much anti-social. 

Copious time spent on the internet only breeds jealousy — especially when you’re given the impression that everyone else seems to be leading much more interesting lives from where you lay in bed. Whether it’s on a remote island in Greece, in a competitive summer class, or — worst of all — playing adult simulator working a temporary 9-5. Should you ever want to ruin your day before 8am, log onto LinkedIn at any point during May or June, where undoubtedly you’ll be flooded with posts from your peers who are “so pleased to finally announce” their jealousy-inducing summer internships. 

But, of course, summer surely does not consist solely of doom-scrolling. When the sky is blue and the birds are chirping, there’s no reason to sit inside all day — go outside and touch some grass, so they say. Life is happening all around you — but that’s precisely why you may find it so hard to participate yourself. From your bedroom window, you watch the neighbourhood children sell lemonade to passers-by and play hopscotch on the pavement where you used to write your name in chalk. During the sickly-sweet expanse of May through August — more so than arguably ever — you have all the time in the world to sit and ponder where you once were and how you got to where you are now.

In your childhood bedroom, the books you once worshipped — with doggy ears and cracked spines as proof — seem immature and predictable compared to the more canonically valued texts you’ve studied extensively at university. The posters you once tacked on your walls to signify to your parents the beginning of your teenage rebellion now seem tacky. And the awards you won at school — once acting as physical proof of guaranteed future success — collect dust and make a mockery of your current stagnancy. You’ll find that while your childhood bedroom hasn’t really changed at all, you have. The world that you know has only gotten bigger, and now the four walls that used to enclose your corner of the universe seem like a decorated shoebox. In a terrifying moment of self-actualisation, you realise the tough love truth: you’re not fifteen anymore, and in fact, you never will be again. 

Eventually, though, you do adjust, and it’s only when you do that August rolls around — arguably the most depressing of months. Of course, February and January are the close second and third (yes, in that order), but those months are often associated with new beginnings, whereas August almost always represents the end — the end of summer, the end of living at home for a while, the end of warmer temperatures, the end of all of your friends living in the same town where you all grew up. August is reserved for module allocations and setting up the next year's tuition plan — painstakingly boring academic logistics that may even provoke excitement for the upcoming year. But that’s exactly it — by August you’re simply sick of summer. 

While the academic season may promise a similarly never-ending cycle of wake-up, module, library, repeat, it’s undeniable that it provides your day-to-day life with structure and, more importantly, purpose. The summer stagnance, on the other hand, leaves you to ponder the big old what-am-I-doing questions — something that your lack of free time at university prevents you from doing. Not to mention that you’re constantly surrounded by people your age who know as little as you about life and exactly what its purpose is. If we’re all feeling lost during the cloudy winter months, at least we’re all feeling lost together. It’s better than sitting idly in your room — wherever it may be — while life seems to pass you by, thinking to yourself, maybe Lana del Rey had a point when she wrote her 2012 hit ‘Summertime Sadness’. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons