childhood | This Will Be Changing

It is now the first day of fall. I noticed how perfect the weather was today when I went out to get my groceries. The sun shone brightly but the air was cool. A few of the trees on my street have already started to change. THIS is the best of weather.

The turn of August to September saw a flare-up of oppressive heat, but that seems to be the last surge of summer. It’s cooling off again; it seems the season is ready to accept defeat. As usual I had that moment of regret for all the days I didn’t spend at the beach, and having only sat outside at a restaurant with friends or family a few times, despite walking by such patios constantly. I barely wore sandals and I spent far too many days inside.

Every year now, I find a moment to complain about how summer is not very exciting as an adult. When you’re a kid you get the time off from school, and depending on your circumstances, your parents will take you somewhere for a vacation (even if it’s just a two hour drive to a town in the same state). For the rest of the summer you read, you spend time with friends, you hang out in someone’s pool (I always knew someone with a pool). You eat a lot of ice cream, go to barbecues, and don’t have to wake up early.

Then you start to get older. For most people, summer jobs start somewhere in the mid to late teens. Some start much earlier and a few won’t have jobs until after they graduate from college–but those will probably spend the summers volunteering or studying. (This story does not include those people who never have to work. I have no frame of reference to talk about them.) Suddenly, you don’t have all these days off anymore. Teenagers’ jobs are often part-time, so although they sacrifice some of their free days, they still have quite a lot of time to eat ice cream and hang out in their friends’ pools.

But then you enter the “real” world. You have a full time job, or two or three part time jobs, and you don’t have the time to enjoy the beach or spend a day wandering around town with your friends. You have responsibilities instead. If you do have the time to do these things whenever you want, chances are you don’t have the money. Much of your summer free-time goes to waste lamenting that you’ll barely be able to pay your bills this month, so instead of going to the beach, you scour Craigslist for a new job. Gone are the days of being free to enjoy the summertime. Just like they said it would, adulthood sucked away all the fun (I don’t know who “they” are exactly).

As summer becomes just another part of the year with the same schedule, the same stress, and the same lack of time, we long for the time when summer actually meant something more than just wondering what the hell you can wear that won’t cause you to die of heatstroke on the way to/in the office.

When you think about it, though, what exactly are we losing? Think back to being a kid during the summer. Really think. My memories of youthful summers are getting a little vague and fragmented at this point, but I’m fairly certain that I ended up bored and ready for summer to be over somewhere around the beginning of August. If I could go back and talk to my ten-year-old self, I’d say “Find something to do and be grateful for your lack of stress.” But unfortunately, hindsight never benefits us. I was always pretty eager to go back to school, even excited.

Of course, I got sick of being back at school after two weeks, instead of two months. I think I just liked the change, the feeling that things were moving forward. New teacher, classroom, notebooks, clothes. Sometimes new friends.

Leisurely summers feel like a story someone told me, rather than anything that really happened. Maybe I block them out because they make me feel guilty for not doing more with my free time when I had so much of it. Of course, I was a kid then, and kids don’t need to be responsible for “getting things done.” I think the problem is that now I know what I would do if I could spend my time how I chose without having to worry about adult things. I’ve felt like there could be so much art, music, friendship, love, etc. in my life, if only I had enough time.

If you knew me a long time ago, or even just a few years ago, believe it when I say that I am different now. In a lot of ways I’m the same, because most people are pretty much who they are in certain, fundamental ways from a very young age. Maybe even the moment they’re born. However, then there’s life, which tends to happen to everyone, and some of us end up being different than how we were, or how we thought we would be.

Generally, people change a bit over time. It’s what they call “growing up” and it sucks.

When I was a very young writer — you know, like 8, 10, 14… — I had so much creative energy. Writing came easily, and although I didn’t really write anything I would call publishable, it was really good for my age. I think of it as developing my craft, so that fact that I’m never going to make money off the stuff I wrote then doesn’t matter.

I can’t say how long exactly, but it’s been such a long time since I had a story in me that I just HAD to write down. It comes once in a while for little ideas, images or just some way of phrasing an obvious aspect of life that seems too important not to put into the world (although I rarely find that the pieces I like best are the ones anyone else really responds to). Those are generally things that I put onto this site as flash pieces. But stories that have a full plot and a length that allows readers to delve into them have not leaped out of me with the wild abandon they used to for quite a while.

I have all sorts of theories about why that is. I don’t know what’s the truth, so I don’t really want to ramble on about that. But when I look at how I used to write, with certainty and energy and the ability to immerse myself in the work, versus the current habits of letting a story sit for years that could be written in a week, wondering if it’ll be worth it, never being able to fully picture the world of my characters, it seems a lot like a side effect of growing up.

While I was thinking about this stupid, stupid fact, I first dubbed it the “maturation of my writing mind.” I immediately decided that didn’t sound right. My writing skills are undoubtedly better now than they were when I was 10, but would I really consider this state now “mature” in comparison to the mindset that allowed me to write without forcing myself to sit down at a keyboard? No. I really wouldn’t. If I had been actively writing all this time, then I could think of the development as maturation. It’s not the case.

I haven’t been growing more mature, just growing older. It’s funny, because I used to be very mature for my age. I think I’ve actually regressed in that department.

At the moment I’m trying really hard to motivate myself, to improve all aspects of my life, including writing. I have no idea how that will go. Stick around; maybe I’ll have some good news in a few months…