the september scaries

on flop eras & harvest seasons

‘What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.’

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

It’s back-to-school season, and for the first time in my life I’m not going back to school. This confuses me. August has melted into September, there’s bonfire smoke lacing the air and tendrils of morning fog climbing the windows and cinnamon in my coffee, and surely that means only one thing: it’s the beginning of a new year. September always feels more like a fresh start than January does, because January does not have new books to buy, new pens to scribble new ideas in new margins, new woollen scarves to wear on walks to the library. New planners and study dates and brunches squeezed between lectures. A new opportunity for progress, to feel the validation of being good at something; an old, familiar routine of rediscovering my purpose that I slip into every year like a well-worn cable knit jumper. 

Except suddenly I’m 22, I’ve outgrown that jumper now, and I’m running out of time to keep pretending that the listlessness that’s settled in my bones is just the usual summer-holiday stagnation, that the dependable rhythm of the academic calendar will save me like it always has. This time, it won’t. All structure has collapsed. Time itself feels elusive; the days slip by and I hardly notice. I’ve become well-acquainted with a gnawing feeling of existential dread which rises to greet me every morning before I’ve even had a conscious thought. My Rory Gilmore days have expired, and I don’t know who to be now. I don’t know where I want to go or how I’m going to get there. I’ve started watching Fleabag again. 

I am, to put it simply, lost. 

I spent the summer under grey skies of my own conjuring. This was supposed to be My Summer of Rest and Relaxation, the last Great Summer of Freedom; the summer I spent so long yearning for when having any time to rest untainted by the spectre of deadlines and grades was a foreign concept. After three years of working myself into the ground, I dreamed of doing nothing. I dreamed of entire days spent reading under oak trees, Nora Ephron movie marathons in bed, sunbaked afternoons getting wine drunk in European city squares, and I did, in fact, indulge in all of these things. But that relentless voice of anxiety I thought would at last be silenced when I escaped the academic cycle has continued to plague me in every single unhurried moment, like the Weasley’s family ghoul banging on the pipes when the house gets too quiet, whispering: You’re not doing enough. You’re wasting precious time. You’re getting left behind. I discovered that while I might be good at resting, I am hopeless at giving myself the grace to actually enjoy it - so is that really resting after all? 

What I hadn’t anticipated about graduating university was that the pressure I put on myself to get the best grades would not just dissolve into nothing but would immediately be replaced by a new pressure, the pressure to get a job and move out and make something of myself, or at the very least start a new hobby (bonus points if it can be monetised). I should have seen this coming. Being an overachiever, after all, means waking up every morning feeling like you have something to prove, even when you have nothing left to give. It means tirelessly gathering evidence of your own exceptionalism to present to an invisible jury constantly evaluating your worth. It means labouring under the weight of your own impossible expectations. 

Over the last two months, I have slowly been forced to confront the fact that my sense of self is almost entirely predicated upon my ability to excel in the various roles I inhabit: student, friend, partner, daughter. Usually I’m thriving in at least one of these roles, and that’s enough to keep me anchored to myself. But lately I have been failing in all of them. I have stumbled into adulthood bleary-eyed and overwhelmed. My life is in transition - leaving university, moving back home, relationships beginning to shift in response to changing contexts - and my frustration at not finding my footing in this new, unsteady ground has seeped like poison into everything. I complain about feeling stuck and lacking purpose, then bare my teeth at any well-meaning family member who suggests I start applying for jobs because I can’t face my own paralysing fear of rejection. I fire out self-destructive bullets of misplaced anger and make enemies of my closest allies because I can’t admit that I’m afraid of the future and having nothing figured out. I snap at my boyfriend and forget to text my friends back. I have not only had an identity crisis, but I have made it everyone else’s problem. 

And now September has arrived, and with it comes the realisation that a summer flop era might just about be acceptable, but to drag it into autumn would be inexcusably mortifying. This spiral of despair has to end. My mindset needs to change with the seasons. 

‘All that time spent acting in bad student plays and debating the merits of polyamory, drinking cheap beer and laughing in the sun - had everyone been plotting, all along, secretly applying for graduate programs and perfecting the art of existential complacency so that when the time came they were ready to switch gears? Had everyone else been playing along with a fantasy that only I was too thick to realise could not last forever?’

— Madeleine Gray, Green Dot

The transition into autumn has got me thinking about this Emma Watson quote that I love: ‘You can’t always be in the reaping stage or the harvest stage of life. Life has seasons.’  I think we often feel so uncomfortable in the quiet periods when we aren’t harvesting. The days or weeks or months when you’re out in the mud toiling, skin stained with soil, sowing seeds with nothing yet to show. When you’re sending out ten CVs a day and waiting for one response, scrimping and saving to one day escape the small town you feel trapped in, writing down half-formed ideas that might eventually string together like village fete bunting. There will be stretches of time, too, when you’re simply just getting by. 

I don’t know who needs to hear this (I do, it’s me) but you do not need to be exceptional all the time. It’s okay to rest and rejuvenate and just lie fallow for a while. It’s okay if all you achieved today was washing your hair or buying a sweet treat from the corner shop. It’s okay if all you did was exist. Just because the harvest moon will soon be cresting the velvet sky doesn’t mean you must shine alongside it. 

I am a daydreamer by nature, which means I am always drifting just beyond the edges of the present. I find it incredibly hard to stay grounded, to live in the heart of the moment. I am, as Dolly Alderton so eloquently put it, ‘always half in life, half in a fantastical version of it in my head’. There are times in my life when I’ve relied on daydreaming as a coping mechanism; other times, it gets in my way. When I went to the Eras Tour in June, I remember several times during the show having to tug my mind back when it began to stray and consciously force myself to stay fully present in what was one of the most electrifying experiences of my life.  Whenever I wander the streets of a new city abroad, I slip out of my own skin into a more vibrant version of myself who lives there and weave a richly detailed fantasy existence with every step, imagining which cafes I would frequent every morning on my cycle to my job at a local bookstore, a sunlit studio, a bustling food market. It isn’t a symptom of any particular dissatisfaction with my life, or a desire to start all over again. It is, of course, about Sylvia Plath’s fig tree (as most things are in your twenties). It’s like I’m so acutely aware of and overwhelmed by the abundance of possible forms my life could take that I can’t only occupy one reality at a time. 

The opportunity to choose the direction in which to take my life next is paralysing, but it’s also an immense privilege. Right now, living at home in the Sussex countryside with no bills to pay and my whole life ahead of me, I am possibly the most free I will ever be - and for the last two months, I’ve been missing it. All the time I’ve spent lost inside my own head, anxious and afraid and adrift in imagined realities happening elsewhere, I have been missing what is right in front of me. Indulgent weekday mornings reading and writing in bed. Long, rambling chats with my mum in the kitchen over coffee and toast. Home-cooked roast dinners and dog walks on Sundays, minus the Sunday scaries. Roaming in the woods and twirling in the mist with nowhere in particular to be. The gentle magic of slow living that won’t last forever. 

I no longer want to fast-forward the years to a future where my choices have already been made. For now, I choose to rest here in the in-between.

The autumn equinox is coming, and I have time.