A Different Approach to Summer

On Letting Go of Who You Used to Be, At Least for Now

A tiny slot canyon I thought I was too scared to hike. Encinitas, California, July 2024.

I attempted to approach summer differently this year. Last summer felt weird and anxious and I spent a lot of mental energy obsessing about optimization. And I didn’t want to do all that this year. I thought the problem was that I had a bunch of random trainings scattered throughout the summer, so I felt like I never got my brain fully extricated from school; rest felt elusive, and just as I’d started to remember that I was person outside of it, my brain had to flip modes.

This year, I started warning people in March that I wasn’t working in June. I’d do the post-school instructional leadership team retreat, answer email and go to meetings the week after the kids were done, but would absolutely, under no circumstances work between June 6th and July 15th, when my first required training was scheduled. I irritated a bunch of people. I surprised even more people than I irritated.

Making plans is an excellent way to get everything to change. While I did spend the three days after school got out on the couch, I found that, last week, even before my cutoff day, I had a lot more energy than usual. I spent big chunks of time at work, and it was all unexpectedly productive and not particularly taxing. I accomplished a bunch of things I’d never expected to touch until July. Because I was busy doing those things, I didn’t accomplish a few things I wanted to, and broke my own rule by working little bits on Monday-Wednesday of this week. But I had the energy to do, so it felt fine to keep going. One of my coworkers has a philosophy about unstructured work time that is basically, “don’t stop while whatever you’re doing is working.” I’ve learned to apply that energetically as well as practically; it is easier to keep going with momentum than to try to start and stop, which is what usually ends up happening when I over-manage my time.

The most important thing I found about breaking my rule was that I didn’t resent the time or energy I was spending. Last summer, I resented almost every bit of work I did (that wasn’t a direct campus-based meeting about our actual plans for our actual kids). This week, it’s felt supportive to have some plans done, have a more manageable late July to-do list, have a draft that I can set aside and come back to in a few weeks. It wasn’t until I was replying to a message from someone on contract right now that basically said, “you’re sharing an awful lot of Google Docs for someone who’s not working past last Friday,” that I figured out what was different from last year: it wasn’t that I really resented the work, but that I resented the continued death-grip on my time. In saying, “I’m not working past June 6th,” I’d made any time I did work feel like a choice rather than an obligation.

Deciding that I’d rather work in the morning before a social phone call, or the afternoon after a lazy morning, or until midnight because my sleep schedule is already a hot mess so who cares, is so different than having to finish something before another class starts or a grant deadline or a meeting that starts immediately after school. Or having to go to a training that inexplicably starts at 7:30 in the morning or conflicts with a yoga class I want to go to. It is these pieces of nonsense that I’m hoping to avoid to fortify myself for the full-on nature of the school year.

I’ve almost always had these longer breaks in my workflow; in theatre, it was the month (if I was lucky) separating contracts or the week off after Christmas Carol closed or the three weeks between the end of summerstock and before academic work started. I’ve always believed that I needed these kind of breaks to recharge, like I’m incapable of finding space if my job doesn’t provide these huge quantities of off-time. I fell back into that pattern with teaching, and have held on really hard to the idea that, without large chunks of time, I can’t possibly rest or function as a regular human.

I’ve also held to this idea socially: while these big breaks are times when I can see people who don’t usually have overlap with me, I also historically have been pretty exhausted by social engagements, especially more than one a day or too many in a week. I have spent most of my life living as a deeply introverted person surrounded by lots of sensory chaos. I’m extremely socially- and people-motivated, but I have visceral memories of whole summers where I dreaded being invited to bars because, God help me, what would I talk about with people who I didn’t already know?

I’m also pretty obsessive (holdover from a rural childhood where every “trip to town” was an ordeal of sorts) about scheduling things in the same area of the city back-to-back: yoga classes, the seemingly endless litany of doctor’s appointments that I can’t leave school for during the year, social endeavors. The problem with this approach is that often it falls apart; an appointment runs long and I’m late to dinner, or I’m suddenly missing one of my favorite yoga classes because of traffic on a highway I usually only drive on weekends. In past summers, both this ineffective pattern and looking at my calendar more generally has made me anxious, even when every single phone call or happy hour or coffee date was one I deeply wanted and intentionally went out of my way to schedule.

But this week, I’ve had a social thing every day, and it’s been the best. Hours feel like minutes, and talking to people I haven’t seen in a year feels like I saw them yesterday (Jenna Woginrich’s description of the gift of this phenomenon is better than anything I can offer). For whatever reason (mid-thirties energy, cultivating relationships with nonjudgmental people, the pandemic), there’s no tinge of exhaustion, and my calendar of events doesn’t scare me. I’m leaving the house once a day, by choice, and couldn’t be happier about it.

All of this is about a shift in logistical approach, but more of it is about my mental orientation to the tasks at hand, and the concept of time in general. It’s Aparigraha and Brahmacharya, yoga’s philosophical concepts that are forever my guiding lights and steepest hills to climb. It’s letting go of the need for every trip to be perfect. It’s not spending energy caring about showing up at dinner in yoga clothes. It’s deciding that seeing people, full stop, is more important than how they see me. And with work, it’s about embracing choice and the mystery of where my brain will want to go each day while releasing the need for tasks to take specific amounts of time or be finished by the kinds of hard deadlines that exist during the rest of the year. It’s letting go, also, just a little, of the stories of who I think I am or who I’ve historically been. For so long, I held tightly to both what I thought were supportive stories (profound and protective introversion, that structure helps manage my anxiety) and what were deeply not (excessive intensity framed negatively and an inability to function without rigid structure). And in letting them go, in whatever small ways I’m able, has opened up a sense of space, of choice, of ease at least for these couple of weeks, that I’d have thought positively impossible this time last year.

I’ve love to hear your thoughts:

• How do you approach big chunks of time off, if you’ve had them?

• What’s something you’ve believed about yourself that you could, potentially, hold just a bit more lightly?

• What areas of space and choice are you finding?

• How do you feel about summer?