Summertime Sadness

Oh right, it’s this again.

I hate summer.

Raised in the Pacific Northwest, I rarely had to experience heat. Which was good, because I can’t deal with it. Most of my memories of family vacations (to places like Pennsylvania, Washington DC, New Orleans, IN LATE AUGUST) are of my family telling me to stop whining about the heat. Everyone’s hot, they’d say. You don’t hear them complaining about it, do you? So I assumed that everyone must be suffering as much as I was, they were just made of tougher stuff.

I raised my kids in California. When we first moved into our area, and wound up rebuilding our house (because it had started life in the 1920s as a cottage built by some weekend warrior with no permits or engineering, lol) we decided we didn’t need to install air-conditioning, because there were only a couple days a year that got hot enough to need it, and it always cooled off at night, anyway. Lol, again! Good one, climate change!

Heat Anger

Okay, so I hate heat. But took a really long time – like most of my kids’ childhoods – for me to realize that I wasn’t an irritable mess in the summer because my routine was blown up, or because the kids were around the house and bugging me all day. Those things were true, but they weren’t the real reason I was mad.

I was mad at the fucking heat.

I can’t do anything when it’s hot. I have no energy or motivation. Nothing is fun. Everything is a miserable, sticky slog. And keep in mind, “hot” to me is anything over about 72 degrees. Above that, my autonomic system starts freaking out and if I move around at all, it thinks I’m about to die.

And for me, anger is one of the ways depression shows up. It took me a long time to recognize that I was depressed, originally, because I didn’t feel depressed–I felt really fucking annoyed at everyone, all the time.

But is it depression? Or is it exhaustion? And does it matter?

Anyway, now I understand why, every June, I start to feel like an unravelling rag.

“Reverse” SAD

By now everyone knows about wintertime Seasonal Affective Disorder. If you don’t have it yourself, you probably know three or four people who do, and it’s intuitive—short, grey days and cold weather seem like a recipe for depression, right? But people don’t understand summertime SAD. Summer’s great! It’s sunny and warm! So many fun things to do! You can be outside!

But summertime SAD, sometimes erroneously called “reverse” SAD (summer and winter are both seasons, okay?), is a real and documented thing. It’s less common than winter SAD, but it’s probably also underreported, because when you say you hate summer, everyone shouts you down and tells you to stop whining.

Here’s some reasons that summer fucking sucks:

• It’s too fucking hot.
• The sun comes up too fucking early, and the goddamn birds start making noises that I can’t sleep through.
• The sun sets too fucking late, so I’m not tired at bedtime.
• The blue fucking sky. It’s so boring, just the same color every day. Give me some nuance, texture, variety, for fuck’s sake.
• Sunscreen feels gross to wear.
• Even without sunscreen, you’re constantly sticky from sweat.
• Sunglasses are only semi-successful at keeping me from going blind every time I’m outdoors.
• Too many people everywhere.
• No matter how much water you drink, you have a headache.
• If you have kids, the routine is different, plus they expect to have fun and shit during the summer and you have to provide it, which means going somewhere crowded and hot.

coping

At least now I know what’s happening, and what to expect. I know that once the sky turns grey again (which takes way too long here, we’re talking November) I’ll feel like myself again. Also, God willing, this is my last summer in California. Portland gets heat waves too, but at least there we have air-conditioning.

In the meantime, here are the strategies I’ve refined:

• Wake up with those goddamned noisy birds and do whatever important thing needs to be done that day, especially if it involves movement, before it gets hot.
• Plan to do nothing during the hot hours of the day, say noon till four. Either sleep or hide in an air-conditioned room.
• Be prepared to have to order take-out or something if the kitchen is too damn hot (that’s not one of the rooms we added a/c to).
• Drink water constantly.
• If I can’t avoid being out in the heat, bring some cooling towels and neck-cooling fan. Plus a hat with a big brim.
• Accept that I can’t change the temperature or my body’s inability to deal with it.

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s for seasons to change, thank God. Bring on the back-to-school sales and premature Halloween candy, please.

_{Sun in the Sky from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons License}