Summer, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
By Shin Hui Lee
Cover Image by Celestia Petrykozy
From left to right: Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook, Chelse Swain and Leslie Hayman in The Virgin Suicides, dir. Sofia Coppola (1999)
Each summer is a promise. Of languid days slinking into blissful nights, bare feet on grass with cold drinks in hand, and deep-bellied laughter on the shoulders of beautiful strangers.
Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway possessed ‘that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer’, we spend most of the year fantasising about how a blazing orb in the sky can magically transform us into something shiny, new and beautiful. For a moment, we envision ourselves the kind of person who floats around a room with effortless charm, says yes to plans without hesitating or cancelling, and wears the self-assured shit out of impulse Depop buys.
Summer tends to give rise to a feverish sense of possibility and freedom that urges us to eat the world before it eats us. The things that are usually frowned upon as tell tale signs of a ‘crisis’ suddenly become enviable displays of a ‘fuck it, it’s summer’ mentality. Quit your job and book a one-way ticket to Bali. Confess undying love for your toxic situationship. Nothing seems to matter, because the curious months between June and September permit us the rare decadence of thought and action that reminds us what it really is to be alive. Messy, impulsive and exhilarating.
Well, that’s the promise anyway. But what happens when we surrender all our aspirations and idealisms to summer and find that it fails to deliver? Are we condemned to wallow in our sweat and sunscreen until the leaves fall again?
These are questions that we nurse cautiously at the back of our minds because no one wants to be caught having the worst of times during the best of times. We police each other’s behaviour during the summer more so than during any other season. What do you mean you’re not coming for rooftop drinks? Why would you spend the hottest day of the year in bed? No excuse ever seems to be good enough in the summer. Have fun or else.
There is always something rather threatening about the leisure of summer. The more time we have on our hands, the more ways we have to devise of filling them up. Devising is the easy part, doing is the hard part. Think of our endless group chat plans and solo date ideas that never come to fruition. An excess of choice and the inability to choose paralyses us, rendering us aimless and apathetic on a scorching summer’s day. It’s like looking forward to a dish at your favourite restaurant and getting there only to find out that the dish is sold out, thus losing your appetite entirely. We arm ourselves in preparation for the summer with paradisiacal dreams just to be stifled by the unbearable heat, our chronic indecision, and idleness of mind and body that strengthens our predilection towards what can only be described as summertime sadness.
Now, let’s say we do eventually get spurred to action. We book holidays and host dinner parties. We dutifully upload our photo dumps and BeReals. We tell ourselves that we are doing everything we can to make this the summer of our lives. Maybe it will be. But even the greatest of holidays and dinner parties are prone to inducing in us a sense of vacuity when we remember that they must come to an end. Such is the melancholic undertone of the last few carefree days of a holiday or the sound of Ubers driving up to collect the last of the guests. They signal our impending return to our lives, where we are faced again with the question of what to do next in the vast abyss that is summer.
As indulgent as such a question may be, it does go some way to rationalising why we often spend the summer in fear of wasting it and end the summer with a nagging ‘this can’t be it’ feeling. While in the winter we can be content with doing nothing because everyone else is also doing nothing, in the summer we are constantly trying to outdo each other even against our deepest desire to just rot at home. We ricochet between reality and fantasy, passivity and activity, boredom and euphoria in our pursuit of the ideal summer, but we have no way of telling whether any of it is working. How close are we to ‘finding ourselves’? Will our summer romance live past our good moods and golden tans? Not knowing is what causes us to despair.
“Summer tends to give rise to a feverish sense of possibility and freedom that urges us to eat the world before it eats us.”
For many of us, last summer especially was about pure release. We had no idea what to expect from our first post-Covid summer- as long as we were outside we were happy. We were down for anything and everything because we realised how much we had taken for granted. We became gluttons for life experiences because we felt like we had been cheated out of too many already. It was a guaranteed no rules, empty-brained good time. But as things have gradually returned to their status quo, the hedonism that we embraced last summer no longer seems to hold the same appeal this summer. If anything, we are realising just how exhausted we are- living solely for the moment, chasing some inexplicable high, making Instagram casual again (only to realise that it takes way more time to curate casualness, of course). As we face yet another onslaught of bad news this summer, how can we be expected to continue to embody such abundant attitudes of self-abandonment? From the US Supreme Court’s decimation of abortion rights to the emergence of Monkeypox, surely even the most optimistic of us can admit to the bleakness of the current state of affairs. The fact that it is not all rainbows and butterflies post-Covid is no doubt a hard pill to swallow. We thought the world was going to end, but then it kept spinning and no one taught us how to survive a near-apocalypse.
Perhaps it is hardly a coincidence that a few years on from #hotgirlsummer, we now find ourselves in the throes of #sadgirlsummer. Between Lana Del Rey audios going viral on Tiktok, the comeback of cigarettes, and the renewed popularity of 90s soft grunge aesthetics à la Heaven by Marc Jacobs, we are evidently in the mood for some sorrow and self-sabotage. For those of us who were on Tumblr circa 2012- 2014, this is very much the devil we know. According to psychology professor Krystine Batcho, ‘major life changes…always coincide with feelings of wistfulness, a return to a time when things felt simpler and less scary’. Indeed, with no idea of how to move forwards in a post-Covid reality, we seem to be on a collective move backwards this summer- in search of what got us through our confusing, angst ridden teenage years, hoping that it can work its magic on us one more time.
What better place to search than within our not-so-distant memories of sitting in our bedrooms reblogging Virgin Suicides stills until the early hours of the morning? There was a very specific comfort in being able to downward spiral on Tumblr. Where mental illness among young people was still largely stigmatised on the outside world, on Tumblr it formed the basis of many deep friendships. Since everyone knew each other only by urls, we were unprecedentedly free to express our unhappiness with the assurance that no one would try to hold us accountable for it. We could live out our manic-pixie-’nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’-heroin chic-pilled act to the fullest. In our fostering of these virtual bonds of complicity, we soon realised that the ‘sadder’ we presented, the more accepted we felt within that community. Being a ‘sad girl’ on Tumblr was in this sense a coping mechanism- one that may not have been able to avail us of our unhappiness but that was comforting in its reminder that at least we were all unhappy together. It is no wonder, then, that #sadgirlsummer is taking the reins against our rising sentiments of nihilism this year. We’re fucked anyways, so what’s a little more damage?
The thing is, a little can very quickly turn into a lot. When depictions and discussions of mental illness are being circulated to no end within a community already predisposed to it, it can turn into a dangerous echo chamber. For researcher James Whitlock, the problem with Tumblr was that it was like a ‘group-therapy session with no therapist’, where ‘young, depressed people’ were hearing things only from other ‘young, depressed people’. Instead of finding reprieve, we were going online only to find an array of mental illnesses being romanticised, glorified and ultimately reinforced. We yearned the company of those who understood and related to our unhappiness, but hardly noticed when that morphed into yearning the perpetuation of the unhappiness itself at all costs. So, as easy as it may be to dismiss #sadgirlsummer as a passing trend, we should be cognisant of the ramifications of leaving such sentiments unchecked once again in the hands of a new generation.
The truth is that we are all a little lost in this post-apocalyptic funk. In processing our unmet expectations and unfulfilled resolutions from the past year, the middle ground between the two extremes of joy and suffering seems to have eluded us. Maybe this summer is about finding our way back. Releasing the fantasy that summer will magically transform us into something shiny, new and beautiful, and embracing instead the rare opportunity it grants us to return to ourselves. Accepting the fact that summer may not always carry with it that uncompromised essence of joie de vivre, but that it can still be a fucking ball. After all, the world hasn’t ended just yet- there shall be more hot summer nights in mid-July for us to feel forever wild.