navigating midsummer haze
Am I bored or nostalgic? Drowsy or enchanted? Patient or expectant? (Over)sleeping or (day)dreaming?
Hello helloo! First of all, thank you to those who read the first letter and subscribed to BLUSH last weekend. I’m very happy about your reactions and responses and I’m thrilled to see where this goes…
The sun, emerged from its grey shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see trees and grassland waist-high under flood water – as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I’m staying in Madrid this summer. My roommates have left the city to be with their families or work anywhere they’re asked to1. So I’m spending all this time alone in our apartment, writing my thesis in front of the fan and trying not to lose touch with my loved ones. Very often I find myself walking down to a café with my headphones and big sunglasses on, playing the same songs, observing the almost empty streets almost vibrating with this 3 p.m. mirage2.
This summer’s themes are work, home, quiet, and a vague sense of outdoor curiosity. Sudor, guiris y Madrid vacía3. I sing this line to myself on repeat as I head back home, screaming from my heart as I hold an ice matcha latte, already late for my self-set afternoon shift. In taking myself for a walk, I want to let the world know that I still exist, that I’m craving adventure and romance, resisting weather and this delusional slow-motion tempo. Then a wave of anxiety hits me as I embrace this illusion of time suspended, like a free fall towards self-indulgence when there’s still so much to do now, even now — especially now.
For many of us, summer can be an anxious time, an extended period of crisis, an unnecessarily long bridge between courses, jobs, relationships, decisions. Some of us feel torn apart between life phases — eras. In this context, we’re likely to notice what I call “midsummer haze,” a feeling of deep emotional unrest and confusion, resulting from two apparently conflicting desires. We want to restore balance and certainty in your life, stick to the habits you’ve worked so hard to create during the year and stay productive even at 40°C. Yet we know we deserve a break, or at least we need it badly. We want to let go, get some rest, or take our chances by exploring other routes, places, intimacies.
The urge to stay productive, socially active and fit4 is hardly compatible with the cultural construction of the summer as a mythical season meant for romance, self-discovery and/or redemption. It’s hard to stay away from this urge to be the main character for those who have based our ideas on “true love” on dialogues from Le Rayon Vert, Before Sunrise or — of course — Call Me By Your Name. In the meantime, we keep up with work stuff, walk to the lidos drenched in sweat, feel awkwardly comfortable back in our parents’ village, spend days reading, watch the girls’ World Cup, make last-minute plans to go to festivals. And of course, we wait for epiphanies or life-changing events and tiny little explosions of seasonal joy.
In the end, all these feelings, once conflicting, converge in the midsummer haze. We wonder: “Am I bored or nostalgic? Drowsy or enchanted? Patient or expectant? (Over)sleeping or (day)dreaming?” There’s a certain discomfort in navigating these fluctuating moods and, as I wrote in my first letter, it takes responsibility to live in a media-market Western fantasy. But there’s room for pleasure in uncertainty — the more you let go, the more intense. Growth always occurs in the in-between, and rebellion in ambivalence. A haze can be a window for revelation.
Funny enough, midsummer haze starts way earlier than in midsummer — probably as soon as the heat becomes relentless — but it is then when it becomes evident. Every year, there is always a moment in mid-August — usually right after my birthday (14th) and amidst all the local festivities spread out throughout the month — when I realize all this will end soon. It is actually ending right now. It is incandescent, devouring itself, devouring us. So damn hot. The other night, partying with a bunch of friends and could-be lovers in the middle of a crowded street in La Latina, I felt my anxiety dissolving, heartbreak and loss alchemized into a feel-good type of nostalgia. It will be gone tomorrow, it’s gone now, but it left me with some proprioceptive wisdom. If you ever felt this feeling, it’s hard to resist it. I don’t think anyone should try.
I wish you a happy midsummer haze and happy (sadly, but gladly) end of the summer.
With light and with love,
I.
Things I’m loving these days (yes! I couldn’t wait to be this kind of Substack girl):
I’ve been listening to Indigo de Souza’s third album All of This Will End on repeat since she launched it last May. Also saw her live in Berlin last July, while I was going through a prickly, many-layered, hazy heartbreak. That could well be a description for the album.
I loved Stephanie Danler’s memoir Stray (2020), a book about family trauma, addiction of many kinds, fresh starts and post-Didion California by the writer of , Sweetbitter — one of the hottest, most inspiring “small women in big cities” novel.
I’ve gotten a hard crush on Molly Gordon, the big-eyed bold brunette girl in Booksmart, Shiva Baby and most recently, in the second season of The Bear. I loved her conversation with the iconic Julia Louis-Dreyfus for Interview magazine, in particular, this thing she said about the work-life balance (or lack thereof): “Sometimes, when I’m in the most pain in my life, I do the best work. Do I think that’s healthy? No. I want to be happy and do good work. But I don’t really have the answer for it.”
Without revealing any personal information about my brave, hard-working roommate C., I want to give a shout-out to her, and to all those who spend the summer working anywhere they’re asked to.
Is it still called a “mirage” even when it’s not on the road? Is that even optically possible? Because it truly felt like that.
For those who don’t know it, this is the outro of the song “Moreno de Contrabando” (“Smuggled Tan”), by the quintessentially Madridian dumb-punk boyband Carolina Durante. It translates as “sweat, foreigners, and Madrid deserted.”
Because what about the Hot Girl Summer, this post-postfeminist wellness-Twitter trend that we’ve been mocking, problematizing, and still following since the post-pandemic era made us more conscious of our bodies, our basic needs, our daily habits, and our economic privilege?