September is hard. It’s a change month. Even when it isn’t, it is. This is what I’m feeling now, and what I feel most years, at this time of year. It’s a hard habit to break.
As an aside: It occurs to me that there are a great many people who do not start school with preschool and then go on to elementary school and high school and college and so on, as the normal course of things. It also occurs to me that there are also many people who do not associate “September” with the start of a new school year, and that this phenomenon is in no way universal. But this is my perspective, and it’s the reality for me and pretty much everybody I know, so that’s how I’m gonna write this.
So: from my perspective, in this era of human existence, we spend most of our young lives going back to school in September. September means a new year, a new teacher, new classmates, new routines and new expectations. And we do this from a young age. I didn’t tell our daughter, before she went to preschool, that this would be the last time for several decades that everything wouldn’t get upended at the end of summer, but you know I was certainly thinking it, inside. I wanted to scream, “Savor this! Feel this freedom with every ounce of yourself! This will not come again for a long time, and even then, so much of it will be lost!” But I didn’t want her to freak out. I’m a parent. That’s my job.
So there’s this ingrained memory, this learned instinct that September comes and it’s time for change. And you do this, year after year after year, until eventually, you graduate from college, you go out into the working world for your first real job, and then September rolls around again and it takes mental effort to force yourself to not panic because for the majority of the years you’ve been alive, everything changes in this month, at this time of year, as the summer winds down and the breezes grow cooler in the evening and the sun starts creeping lower in the sky.
And you do this for a few years, and eventually, you start to be ok with it. “September means change for other people, but not for me,” you tell yourself. It’s just another month, and you can still go to the beach in September. You can still go on vacation in September. You can still sit outside and grill cheeseburgers in September.
And then you decide to go to grad school, and once again, September equals change, and all the work you’ve done to deprogram yourself has to be put aside. You plug along, maybe you take more summer classes, you try to figure out how you can get done with your advanced degree. For me, I went part time, and it took me another four years. Another four years of Septembers, of getting new notebooks and new three-ring binders, of renewing parking permits and trying to figure out if I really really needed the textbook or not. And, of seeing people I hadn’t seen all summer. Of meeting new people. Of learning new things.
And then you graduate, and it’s done. You go back to unlearning the end-of-summer routine. You smile as you walk through a crowded Target and you smile as you walk through the streets of Boston during Allston Christmas and maybe you snag a new lamp or a coffee table for yourself. But it’s ok now, it’s just another month.
And then you have a kid, and it starts all over again. And you wonder what the point was, of bothering to try deprogramming yourself.
It is all new, every year. The summer goes by, the fall waits in the wings, and no, the world doesn’t end on the first day of the ninth month, but it does get different. And winter will come, and spring will follow, and the cycle will repeat, and all of those changes are changes that touch you in different ways, that will shift the world in different ways, the same each year, but different as well.
Not like September, though. That’s a special kind of different. A special kind of marking the passage of time with a special kind of remembering, and a special kind of changing.
I don’t know for a fact that anybody else feels this way, and I agree that it’s perhaps a little dramatic and a little, I don’t know—what’s the word I’m looking for? A little precious, a little presumptuous, a little privileged to sit here and gaze wistfully and smell the melancholy air of autumn because I’m lucky enough to be one of a tiny fraction of humans who have existed who also had a formal education that goes for 180 days and begins at the same time of year, every year, for, what, 18 years?
But I guess that’s also true of most things. Things we may consider universal in our experience are actually quite unique, in the grand scheme of things. We call them “first world problems,” right?
August was a great month. Lots of downtime. September? Things start up again. So. Back to writing. To writing more.
The project I’m working on continues along. I have some other ideas for stuff, which is good, because I’m running out of my backlog of finished content. Gotta be productive. I’m wondering if I can get faster about some things. Stop overthinking things. Not worry about twist endings. Write scenes, write vignettes. Describe the world, and be ok that that’s enough.
Lots to do, lots to do. Well, this is the time for it.
