#30 Summer Blues
Cycles are powerful, but so are you.
The sunlight is still streaming in through my window most mornings, lately. It is late September and I’ve been feeling the back-to-school energy since early this month, when I was busy emailing with the Immigration Office. The Immigration Office People are always kind in their written communications, and they do get back to me promptly. They also avoid making me any promises. On the other hand, I’ve been rewriting the entire copy of my website, launching a new vision of Amsterdive with Ana Searches For Meaningand spent a couple of months working at a vintage store in many different corners of Amsterdam.
It’s fair to say the energy this late September is, well, very transitional, very new beginnings, very back to school. Every year, it’s an exercise in having some kind of foresight, the one informed by hindsight. Just like that, there are three months left of the year and about two months to my 27th birthday. TWENTY SEVEN! I know I think it every year, I’m always getting to my approximate age, and then I arrive. Another turning point arrives within the turning points, so naturally, there are many things swimming in my little brain. September symbolizes transitions because one September eight years ago, I first made my way to university in Rotterdam. Another September five years ago, I went to my first day at my full-time job. And then another September two years ago, I became self-employed. Even September last year was another transition: I got the green light to move back to Amsterdam mid-month and was back here by October 2nd.
So, yes, transitional energy. I imagine you have some of those periods in your life, whether in September or other months of the year.
Back to the Immigration Office People: a very concrete, real thing. They’re very nice and yet cannot make promises because that is how Immigration goes. I am, in a way, finding a lot more of me beyond the paperwork this time around: last month, visiting friends from back home (Venezuela) in Paris, Alejandro tells me he’s exhausted of identifying with something as heavy as the struggle behind the immigration procedure. If he frees up space to just be who he is, he can do so much more - suddenly, space in his life opens up to reach his full potential, to be better, to reach higher. Choosing to decouple himself from the weight of proving his right to residence in a country that isn’t his own makes things different; it does. I can see it in the way he talks, in the way he carries himself. There are so many other places we could go, he says. Imagine immigration procedures in a country like the U.S. (A place notorious for their many, many hoops and tricks, and decades of procedures to even be able to claim a permanent residence). We are so blessed. (We are).
June was an existential month and it all came to a head in August. I would type out notes about what my Purpose is in the world and my Why and the incessant questioning, the idea that I would discover it as I got older slipping from my fingertips, the hope of something tangible dissolving very quickly. Approaching another, new year of life is comforting: I will be 27 and I will be maybe more patient, with myself and with the shape of the trajectory my life takes. It’s a rite of passage, after all, that feels truly universal. At a time when something as tangible as an immigration procedure is looming on the horizon, I find a lot more community nowadays in the same feelings we’re all harboring, wondering where exactly to go from here. There’s never been a better time to lean into people navigating the same things - from people my age to those older than me or younger, just people passing from one chapter to the next (immigration or not).
I think I had a bit of the Summer Blues, or maybe I have them as a result of Summer coming to an end. In a flurry of trains and buses and flights, the Sun is slowly starting to dwindle on this side of the world, just as it continues shining, every single day at just around 6 in the morning, back in Venezuela. Then I think about my Purpose and the elusive Why and it probably just has to do with this: marking the seasons. Breathing in the cold morning air in September. Stretching my limbs out on a mat, lying on the floor. Waking up before my alarm and being very pleased with how rested I feel. Making coffee from the Good Beans place in my tiny French press. Stuff like that. I know, I know, I should remember those really great feelings more often. But I think our biggest assets (our brains) are also our biggest enemies sometimes. All that need to feel purposeful in the world has been around since ancient times, and it will be here long after I die.
And yet, Summer Blues can have a sort of liminal strange feeling to them that can also feel very… transformative. (I am not talking about Seasonal Affective Disorder). I am talking about the slowness that Summer months bring, how you’re not really here, but not really there: planning holidays and getting there and getting back, the Sun beating down our faces at unexpected times. Summer Blues are those moments in between July weekends when there’s a bit of aimlessness about the day. It’s wanting to maybe go for a drink or a few and drawing the curtains down at 10 p.m. even when it’s still light out.
In those moments, I find nothing really fits: there’s a new shape forming or a new version of something but you’re not there, not yet, or not completely. All the anticipation for Summer comes and hits you with a wave of childhood nostalgia. The friends you made in the pool during family vacations. Or it comes at you with the nagging feeling that you should be making the most out of your holiday. Or the impending deadline, the impending Fall, the coming September: work to be done. Things to be achieved. Dreams to be planned. I recall my conversation with Alejandro and feeling like a bit of a ghost. For once, the feeling isn’t frightening. What did Ram Dass say? Ah. You can do it like it's a great weight on you, or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.
The three months roll on ahead of me, incessantly. I type another email to the Immigration Office People.