I knew that going home for Summer would be hard on me. To keep it simple, I don’t have a stellar home life. My mom and I are a living example of the phrase “one paycheck away from being on the streets”. We don’t get along well at all. I have few lasting friendships from home, and making plans can be tricky when we all live in different parts of LA County and none of us have cars of our own. My depression skyrockets while my motivation sinks. I self-isolate from all of my friends until I find myself at the brink of manic episodes. I grow accustomed to seemingly unproductive days, convincing myself I’m only wasting my time. I blame myself, I viciously hate circumstance, I keep a track of telling myself that I’m going nowhere on repeat. The summertime sadness is real.

I haven’t communicated with my friends too much since the start of the break. However, whenever we have corresponded, we found our emotional states to be outrageously similar. I talked to many of my friends who’ve told me they feel at the end of their ropes too, sharing similar sentiments of loneliness, isolation, demotivation and unproductivity. I offer my words of encouragement and support where I can and remind them that it makes sense as to why they feel so miserable-- it’s a hard shift to go from college life back to home life. Our focuses shift away from our studies and turn towards getting Summer jobs, seeing family, making plans and relaxing. However, some of us find it hard to maintain Summer jobs, don’t get along with our family and have not the resources to make the plans we want to make. Don’t even think about relaxing; switching from a structured schedule that makes it easy to focus on our careers to having no guidance nor sense of routine makes it hard to relax, as you think having so much free time should make it easy to be productive.

There’s a fantastic article that discusses the harmful impacts on children that come with holding this season up to high expectations, how a lot of our perceptions of what a Summer should look like are in actuality pretty classist. Not only that, but how it’s perfectly okay to have plans for Summer that differ from the picturesque visions of camping, roadtripping, concerts and always having adventurous plans. In reality, Summer is a limboesque time of the year, and that becomes especially clear when you’re a college student returning home but feeling incredibly out of place, potentially more-so than you’ve ever felt before there.

I realize it’s not just me having a bad Summer afterall. In fact, there are plenty of reasons as to why not only me, but many of my friends, if not a large percentage of students returning home feel like this Summer is destroying them. As someone who’s been ready to leave the nest for quite some time, being forced to come back home after having a taste of what it’s like in the greater, overarching world makes the struggles I grew up with that much worse. What were normal struggles a year ago are painful absurdities of the past I’m being forced to revisit.

While each individual has their own personal experience, that narrative seems to be true for more folks than just me. Recognizing that gives me hope. While it doesn’t necessarily make it easier, it helps to know that it isn’t my life, but rather how unnaturally Summer fits into it, in that my life is now largely revolving around college. So when there’s a giant unstructured gap in the year, it makes sense why I’m crumbling under the weight of existential crises. I don’t have a definitive solution, but the more I see how similarly this season is treating others, I realize that I’m far from alone and one way or another, I’ll pull through it.