Summer soon. Long days, long nights, light at all hours, illuminating everything. Nowhere to hide — Dolly Alderton, Ghosts
Summer is, after all, the season of escape: the landscape in which to contemplate, alone, our failures and our possibilities; the safety valve, the frontier that none of us wants—or can afford—to see closed. — Joan Didion, ‘American Summer’ in Vogue
Notes from the Mailbox
Every few weeks, I ask you gorgeous paid subscribers what you’d like me to write about. This is what you said this week:
Maybe something about summer scaries / fomo or how to be okay with your mind and body.
So, here’s a little something about that. I hope you like it.
Summer can be cruel. It can cut, knife-like, to the very centre of you. The hay fever and the sunburn and those wasps, always angry, buzzing around the top of your Aperol spritz, or blackberry jam. The phrase ‘bikini body’, the florescent skies, everything too bright and busy and loud, fizzing with expectation, with pressure. Men looking up from their phones to crone, to leer. Thighs rubbing together like a punishment. Carefully applied make up melting away before it even gets to midday. An ever-present SULA. Oh, Taylor Swift was right. Summer can be cruel.
According to Dolly Alderton, ‘how is your summer going?’ is one of the worst questions one person can ask another, between the months of June and September:
How is your summer going, I now realise, means: how fun are you? The way in which someone responds to summer is used as a yardstick to measure how relaxed and happy they are. The man who is tired of Mr Whippy is tired of life, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson.
As Michael Cragg writes for The Guardian:
There are “songs of the summer”, a range of “summer blockbusters” and #HotGirlSummer and #BeachBodyReady hashtags, all creating a sense that this period will define the year. No one asks: “How was your winter?”
It’s as though summer holds up a mirror to your life.
It asks: how carefree are you? How beautiful? How thin? How sociable and popular and nonchalant? How many times have you said yes to skinny dipping, or spontaneous drinks, or that cigarette after an al fresco dinner? How financially stable are you? Have you spent the summer in Europe, recently? And what about weddings? Have you been a bridesmaid this summer?!? If you’re single, are you frolicking with various lovers in wildflower fields? If you’re in a relationship, are you getting engaged? Married? Having a baby? Going to some White Lotus style hotel with another couple to spend days on end wearing linen and talking about the recession, or cultural collapse, or ‘what’s happening to New York’?
What kind of summer even is it? A hot girl summer? Or a rat girl summer? A tomato girl summer? Are you more Barbenheimer or Barbie, and what does this say about you, and also our pop cultural landscape?
Last year, obviously, it was BRAT summer. This year, some are predicting, it’s going to be Lorde summer. Or Brat Summer x2. Or Jam Girl Summer. Or Crash Out Summer. Or Touch Grass Summer. It’s unlikely, I think, to be Sad Girl Summer. Or Tired Girl Summer. Or Tee-Total Introvert Girl Summer.
On Showing Skin (What Hannah Knew)
One thing I’ve noticed, on my Girls re-watch, is that in Lena Dunham’s New York, it’s almost always summer.
A lot has been said about this, on Reddit (obviously) but also in other places, like Vulture, which published a whole article entitled ‘Why Is Girls (Literally) So Hot?’. In this (genuinely wonderful) piece of journalism, Kathryn VanArendonk writes:
Consent, vulnerability, anxiety, immodesty, awkwardness, sexiness: summer, and the near-nakedness that can go with it, lets all of Girls’ most favourite thematic obsessions swim right across the surface […] And also, of course, because it’s a show about a world full of people trying to deny that winter is coming — and often succeeding.
Much, too, has been written by and about Lena Dunham’s body on Girls. But one thing (one of the only things?!) that I love about Hannah’s character, is that she is not preoccupied with losing weight, that endless pursuit of thinness. It comes up, of course (she’s ’13 pounds overweight!’, as she screams at Adam on a pavement, wearing a nightgown and seemingly nothing else as she walks back from the hospital in the middle of the night), but it’s not something she tortures herself over. She eats cupcakes in the bath. She is unabashed about her nakedness. Her body just is. As Kathryn VanArendonk writes: Girls is “about women’s bodies, and about insisting that they’re seen.”
If summer holds a mirror to your life, it does the same to your body. With all that light, all that heat, there are very few places to hide. And for women and girls who’ve been told their whole lives that they better not be seen unless they’re perfect and even then they’ll be shouted at in public by stupid, ignorant, boorish men—well, to be seen is incredibly scary.
But here’s the thing: we only get to live this one life. We only get so many summers. And we get to live it all in these bodies; these fascinating, undulating, beautiful things that fluctuate with the moon and the months and that keep us safe and fight off infection and carry literal children, sometimes. These hairy and scarred and pimpled things that, every single day, fight to exist. To sweat without shame, to dimple without self-hatred, to walk very fast up a hill and run into the sea and fart in bed and feel buoyed by bubbling wine. To exist, without shame or self-hatred or incessant observation. Just. One. Life.
The summer of a lifetime
Personally, I love summer. I love the lightness, the brightness, the expectation of it. I love the warmth, the sunlight, the possibility that comes alongside a cold glass of rosé at five pm on a Friday in June. I love that it feels like everything feels possible. That, at any moment, I might just hop on a train to Paris or cut my hair short or read a whole novel in a day, sitting on the grass in my garden, just because I can. (I won’t, but I like the idea that I could).
But this is a relatively new feeling.
The thing is, I used to worry, a lot, about having the ‘summer of a lifetime’. Every single summer. About being hot enough and tanned enough and busy enough. And then, one year, I decided that I wanted to be a writer, and I spent a summer inside, alone, writing. A whole summer.
All I did was get up early to write, go out for long walks, and go to bed early. And I think it freed me, a bit. It reminded me of something so very important: that these lives are ours to live, on our terms. Not in a you-are-an-island-fuck-everybody-else way, but in a oh-wow-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-perfect-summer-but-i-do-have-the-luxury-of-knowing-who-i-am-and-also-what-i-like-doing-so-i-might-spend-my-summer-doing-that way.
So, I decided that I like wearing oversized things. Boxer shorts. XL T shirts. Scunchies. I decided that I value comfort over everything else. That you are how you spend your time, and how you talk to yourself, and how you talk to other people, and that this was the most important thing. That I didn’t have to go to Europe or host a barbeque or skinny dip or spend all my savings on ‘glowing up’ because what I value, the things I love, are not those things.
These are the things I love, in the summer: Reading. Getting up early. Planning parties, or presents (or both) for the people I love. Writing. Feeling rested. And hydrated. Passionfruit martinis. Halloumi fries. Eating al fresco. Reading al fresco. Reading in bed. Weekends in the countryside. Weekends at home. Weekends in bed. Meditation. Moments of peace. Hand-held fans. Places with air con. Clothes that flow. Afternoons drinking cocktails. Full-day hikes. Polaroid pictures. Huge sunset concerts wearing sequins and glitter and shouting ‘AS IT WAS’ or ‘FUCK THE PATRIARCHY’ with thousands of other people who just want to sing and dance for a few hours because that’s what joy is.
These are the things I don’t feel the need to do, anymore, in the summer: Plan every moment of my time. Go on holiday. Glow up. Stay awake just because it’s light outside. Go outside just because it’s sunny. Do things for the sake of being busy. Drink Pimm’s. Eat quiche. Go on a boat. Go to a festival. Wear heels. Care more about how I look than how I feel.
You Know It’s Not The Same (As It Was)
For Vogue, Joan Didion once wrote a gorgeous essay called ‘American Summer’, about how no summers in adulthood can ever quite live up to our memories of those spent in childhood:
Few children remember their swimming lessons; we remember instead the feel, summer nights, of a faded batiste nightgown against our legs as we leaned out an upstairs window and tried to hear the music down the lake, and wished we were old enough to get kissed.
Because wasn’t it wonderful, being a child in the summer? The timeless freedom of it? Existing without a future, without a past, only you and your soft skin, staring through the tiny gaps in a trampoline, or sliding your body across the seats of a car baking in the heat. The particular, peculiar smell of fresh grass and petrol, the taste of the chocolate chips in mint ice cream, all of it melting on your tongue. Dirt under your fingernails. The whole of life a game. The heat a balm, not a punishment. No need to scrutinise your body, to worry about parts of it rubbing together, because you are eight years old and you have bigger things to worry about (staying up late to watch a film; seeing a snake for the very first time, slinking at the bottom of the garden; whether this car journey would ever ever end). Because when you were eight, and it was the summer? Well. You were too busy seeing the world to worry about it seeing you.
Tired of Mr Whippy?
So: if summer is a mirror, it stands to reason that it can be cruel because you can be cruel. That your reflection can mutter the kind of things you’d never say to other people, especially to people you love. That the expectation of it all – to be outside, and happy, always and forever, and to be seen (and to see yourself) – becomes too much. That it turns inwards.
But what if you released those expectations? What then?
Because, dear reader, a person who is tired of Mr Whippy, or too-long days, or standing on stifling buses for your commute, is not tired of life. They just need a day or two beside a fan, perhaps in bed, with their favourite book and/or TV show. A person who worries about their imperfect body is a) completely normal and b) simultaneously performing so many wondrous things within their body at that very moment that it’s actually mind boggling (breathing, pumping blood, interacting with some harmful bacteria, or something, I don’t know, I’m not a scientist).
Perhaps what we need is a summer with no expectations. A summer in which we make plans based on what we want to do, not what we think we should do according to random cultural unwritten rules. Perhaps we need to let the idea of perfection drift up and away, balloon-like, into a clear sky, and then go inside and make a cup of tea and read our book in bed and remind ourselves that tomorrow, too, will come.
That our bodies are miraculous and our lives are short and that we are so wonderfully lucky to be able to experience the myriad of things that we do. To be able to look up any poem that’s ever been published on the internet and also to memorise our favourite lyrics through Spotify and re-watch GIRLS and order sparkling wine on a Saturday afternoon and fold laundry that we washed in our homes.
That live with autonomy, and freedom, and to share memes and voice notes and laugh so much that you cry, or you clutch your stomach, or lose your breath, or all three, are some of the many, many beauties of this life.
That, to see them, to quote Oscar Wilde, is in the eye of the beholder.
And that the beholder, of course, is you.
this was the absolute best article I read here so far. so good that I even read most of it out loud ! the quotes at the beginning, the (so very accurate) lists, the general pace of the text — so poetic and true and relatable. thank you❤️🩹
The pressure to go outside and visibly enjoy oneself when it’s sunny is REAL.