august

Growing up I dreamed of having a summer birthday.

In elementary school as October rolled around every fall I would get excited to share cupcakes with my classmates and receive special treatment in the form of leading the line to recess. Though like the leaves on the trees that specialness had fallen away long before June and July came into view.

The kids with summer birthdays got to host pool parties and beach picnics and barbecues. Much more wondrous and magical than going to a pumpkin patch or an indoor skating rink or trampoline park.

When I rounded the corner to middle school and high school this envy only grew. Having a fall birthday no longer meant anything during a school day.

Meanwhile my friends who were born in the summer months had the luxury of warm and wide open days of celebration every year, often extending these festivities into carefree weekend long events. 

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However, summer and all, I decided long ago that I would never want my birthday in August.

August for me marked a predictable onset of anxiety sometimes in conjunction with dread that the start of an approaching school year had delivered for as long as I can remember.

This is a complicated statement because I mostly really liked school, usually finding myself the first to admit at the end of a long summer that I was ready, excited even, to— ‘get back into routine’ —the unmistakeable structure and flow that comes with a school year.

This paradox of craving that schedule and blank page while also feeling like I was mourning some loss of freedom produced a friendly combination of anxiety and relief. 

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It wasn’t until this August that the lack of relief in absence of this familiar newness got me thinking about the way we are programmed to sway along to the rhythm of the school calendar without much of a second though.

Sure, this looks different in different parts of the country, even more apparent at different colleges, vastly different across the world– yet it wasn’t until I found myself in an August absent of new beginnings that I realized how much I was really letting go of a melody I’d been humming along to my entire life. The certainty of the structure I’d known was no longer holding my life in place.

I sat, I sit on a blank canvas. 

Some people prolong the familiarity of singing along to this tune for as long as they possibly can, the forever student who floats from K-12 into college and on to 10 more years in graduate education of their choosing.

There is no problem there, but feeling like I just woke up to this at 22, I can’t imagine waking up one day at 35 to find I’d never experienced the changing of seasons without an externally induced change in myself that the public school system had ingrained in me as something I needed. 

I’ve been living with anxiety attached to August for the majority of my life because it always meant

a step forward

a step into the unknown

a step up, whether I liked it or not.

—

Can’t we choose to take that step at any time? At any month? At any moment?

Is this what it means to be an adult?

Being held accountable to propel yourself forward in life rather than wait for some external influence to tell you it is time and you are ready.

For as much as I’ve been oblivious to this background soundtrack, I can also identify times in my life where I haven’t waited to step into the new, the uncertainty, the unknown, the up level. 

Where I’ve changed the song half way through and felt empowered by this defiance of time and the construct of the calendar year we all cling to.

There is a newfound freedom in the postgraduate realization that we can step forward, step up, change, try something new, change our minds, or pack up and move across the world whenever we so choose.

It doesn’t have to be August, or January 1st, or a Monday morning. It is as simple as a decision we make.

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So how do I then decide to no longer fear August? Especially from where I sit, still in the uncertainty of what this next chapter is bringing?

I sit still.

I sit with each day. 

I focus on what action I can take in each moment and I release the control of what I can’t.

I go one day at a time, and before I know it, it isn’t August at all.

Something new has begun, freedom from this rhythm, a willingness to change the tune, skip the track, even hit shuffle and leave it up to fate.

Freedom to decide that any day will be the day when I so choose it.