Summertime Sadness
By: Jeremy Scott
Tags: Depression, Sad, Mental Health, Hope, Summer

Summertime Sadness

Sweating through the heat, I stand at the precipice of the self and forever. There is no object, no focus for my sadness. It is a lingering haze, as powerful as the humidity that swallows you whole upon stepping outside. All I want is sleep, to rest, to dissolve, to melt away like the sugar in Grandma’s sweet tea. Full sublimation. The heat and the pressure that I feel in my chest are inextricably linked. Yet, I crave the purifying toxicity of perspiration, ninety plus degree temperatures, and the particular sadness that comes with it. I yearn yearly for that sweltering that leaves you feeling that there will never be enough water to quench your thirst and never enough sleep to rest your soul.

As I grow older, summer is the time when my personal nostalgia is most in bloom. Not nostalgia for the media that I consumed as we often think of Millennial nostalgia, but personal in the way that I remember the summers of my past when I spent extended time with my grandparents at their farm, when I traveled to various horse shows as an obligatory tagalong, when Dad and I would go out and walk around the neighborhood and talk about God and life. These summers of my childhood were freeing for they removed me from the bonds of structure that school imposed and also put distance between those that bullied me and myself.

There are as many types of sadness on the spectrum of depression as there are categories of weather. Summer nostalgia engenders a bittersweet sadness that is a palliative to the cold melancholy of winter, where the light recedes both in your soul and outside your window.

Do you remember when? You ask yourself over and over again during those three months that the sun is the strongest.

“Do you remember when I played in the mud nonstop during that horse show in Vidalia?”

“Do you remember when we went to New York and got lost trying to find Times Square?”

“Do you remember? Do you?”

Memory is linked to identity and depression is a stripping of one’s identity. It is a force with a life of its own that is attempting to steal your personality and replace it with a shadow doppelganger.

Living in the present and mindfulness is offered as rescue lines to the chronically depressed, but I can attest that attempting to live fully in a depressed state’s present tense is like being nothing and not in the positive enlightening way that makes you feel at one with everything. It is a nothingness that cores your heart out and lobotomizes your mind. It is the death of the spirit while the body lives on. It is zombification. That is what so many people fear will be the side effect of taking anti-depressants, for depression is a disease that is fully rooted in keeping you thinking either deep into the past or far into the future.

I live with depression and I always will. There is no cure. It is chronic and it has and forever will shape me completely from the bottom up. I have learned how to live with the ups and downs that come with the seasons, but there is no greater relief than knowing that winter will be over soon and the heat of the solar rays will be returning to melt away the frost of my melancholy. I will remain with the lingering humidity like sadness and that’s bearable. Summertime sadness leads to days spent on my back porch, smoking cigarettes and being in reverie of times past when things weren’t perfect, but they are held to a certain charm with the ware of time, age, and reflection.