And so, summer is here.

It used to be a time of celebration.  No school. Fun field trips (I never took holidays…and evidently I may never will on a regular basis). As a teenager, hanging around the barn a little more often (I was never quite the barn rat – well, maybe I was for a few weeks before I got “laid off” lol). I was always more of a winter person though. I’m not sure why exactly but I never liked the heat all that much.

But now summer seems to mark the ending of another academic year. The academic year that never was.

What’s worse than a has-been? A never-been.

I’ve never been this. I’ve never been that. Each day is another exercise is nothingness. I feel like I’m in a never ending limbo. Suspended in a sea of mediocrity. Floating listlessly.

I wish for the sunny youth of summer. The innocence as bright as the sun’s strong rays. When the truth and the critic didn’t feel one and the same.

But now, summer just seems to mark another year, another year of nothing. So much so that anything else almost seems overwhelming, stuck  into the endless cycle of nothingness. Yet meanwhile, they children run, play and scream in joy. I stay inside, watching the time go by wordlessly.

Maybe I’ve always been like that. As a kid, I was always the dork that spent the summer reading in the reading room or swinging on the swing for hours. One summer I even taught myself how to “see” the images in the Magic Eye books – more or less (I found some worked better than others…though I’m not sure if I can still see them).

Maybe you’re not growing if what you’re doing doesn’t scare you. But fear is a powerful thing. It’s way easier to simply stay in the shadows rather then attempt to chase the golden light with all sort of barriers in the way.

And every summer it says the same, as if the summer was somehow another year new. Another school year. Another new year of learning. Of growing? But what does it mean when you feel that you barely learnt anything? What does it mean when you’re not sure if you grew that much, still stuck in your ways?

What does it mean when everything feels impossible and you’re not sure how you’re going to move forward? Maybe it’s just normal growing pains – the growing pains of transitions, of really growing up but it all feels like I’m flying towards the sun at full speed.