The Summer of Me

turning a season i hate into something i need

picture by me

I stand before you on the precipice of summer, a season I hate for all the right reasons, but am welcoming this year. My brother-in-law keeps calling it “the summer of Michele” but I’m thinking more along the lines of “the summer of finding out.” Finding out who I am, where I am going, what I need to survive, where I’m going to direct my love.

Summer for me is a time to close myself off, to sit inside in the air conditioned living room watching sports and movies and scrolling twitter while ignoring the heat and humidity. On the weekends I go outside in the earliest hours of the morning to water the plants and again when the dog needs walking and that’s about it. During the week I go from air conditioned car to overly air conditioned office, back home again without stopping anywhere in between. Summer is for hiding. Summer is for complaining. Summer is the worst.

But this year I am a different woman. Newly separated, doing a slow dance toward divorce, I am at once torn apart and trying to bandage myself together. I’ve allowed myself the four or so months since we separated to plumb the absolute depths of my sadness and despair. I’ve experienced anger and frustration, I’ve felt resolve and felt myself slipping away. Summer feels like the right time to pack all that away and start as fresh as the hydrangeas I planted. I want to grow, I want to bloom, I want to blossom into something, someone I’ve been looking to be for a long time and a season in which we are coming out of a pandemic, and in which I am coming out of a stagnating marriage, seems ideal.

The summers of my childhood were damn near idyllic. We spent all day in our bathing suits, alternating between the pool and the sprinklers and laying on towels in the grass trying to get tanned while reading a Judy Blume book. Sometimes my mother and aunt would pack us all into the station wagon and we’d go to the beach. Sunburns and salt water and sand, with the promise of ice cream at the end of the day. It was a time of freedom, of feeling like the world belonged to me. I can’t replicate all of that - the idea of sitting on a hot beach all day does not thrill me - but I can reach for that feeling of escape, of freedom, of knowing exactly what I need to make me happy.

I don’t care about hot girl summer. That’s not what I’m going for here. You can all work on your beach bodies and go out to bars and clubs and celebrate the fact that we are on the verge of living fully once more, and I will cheer you on. What I care about personally is my mind and my heart and healing both. I want to climb out of the darkness and grab onto whatever shaft of light I can find. If that means venturing out beyond my living room into the heat and humidity of a Long Island summer, then so be it. That may mean dusting off my camera and going on photo adventures. It may mean hiking the hundreds of trails we have here. It may mean just meeting up with people, having a beer or two while talking about life. It’s all about facing forward instead of looking behind, instead of sitting on my couch contemplating what I did wrong, what wrong turns I took, how I am to blame for everything. I refuse to spend my nights like that anymore. It’s summer and the world is calling me, gently coaxing me out of my shell of despair. There are arboretums to see, gardens to walk through, museums to visit, people to converse with.

Back before things went to hell, we used to go on adventures. We’d travel places from Chicago to Barcelona. We’d get in the car on weekends and look for adventure, always with my camera in tow. Somewhere along the line I lost my sense of adventure. We stopped traveling. My camera sat on a shelf while I withered away on my couch. When we lost ourselves, we lost everything we loved. I have spent the last four years at least in a purgatory that I knew no way out of. Who knew it would take the dissolution of our marriage to help me break free of that purgatory. The chains I wrapped myself up in have loosened.

I am ready for adventure again. I am ready to find out what I’m made of. I am free of constraints, free of codependency, free of being burdened at the same time I was feeling like a burden myself. Summer is the perfect time to walk out my door and see what awaits me, see what I’m made of. I’m learning that I don’t need someone else in my life to make the world worth seeing. I’m excited to see what else there is to learn about me, about the world I inhabit. That world has to expand beyond my air conditioned living room. I have to make myself uncomfortable in order to learn to be comfortable with myself. There exists a whole world outside of the confines of my house and I’m about to explore that with a freedom and a purpose I never had before.

It’s summer and I’m all in.