Summer Won’t End…and I’m just over it

Sometimes even when life is just normal, it can be depressing. You go to work. You come home. You go to work. You get the idea.

Right now, life feels hard. I don’t know why. I really wish I knew.

I can’t even compare my general malaise with any actual trial or tribulation. I just currently don’t have a zest for life. Which means writing anything is hard.

It means I looked at my StoryGraph and saw that Sarah J. Maas is my most-read author and that made me cry because she’s not even my favorite. Shouldn’t your favorite be your most read? My favorite is John Scalzi, and while he’s funny and writes a mean space opera, I don’t know if I need to cry because he’s not #1.

For a bookish girl who lives with depression, when I’m depressed I retreat into books. Not necessarily reading them, but obsessively organizing, buying, shuffling, researching. All these things that make me feel as if I’m moving somewhere.

And honestly, this time of year I get depressed because it’s so hot I feel like you could bake cookies on your dashboard or fry an egg on the sidewalk. Kids are back in school, but it’s still 100 degrees outside. It’s criminal.

I need crisp fall air, a PSL, and a sunny window seat. I need a hoodie and not to sweat while wearing long sleeves. I need to smell the pages of my book and think, ah yes, it’s fall y’all.

Instead, I saw the PSL announcements and thought WTF Starbucks, it’s 100 damn degrees outside. I can’t drink anything besides Diet Coke and iced tea for another month. You can go to f**king h#ll. Maybe that’s the heat or the perimenopause talking. Not sure.

I do know that I’ve read 12 SJM books in the last four months, and if I force myself to read Kingdom of Ash I will probably start a fire in my fireplace. That says I need an SJM break.

So I’ve picked up a few other books with high hopes.

First was The Love Hypothesis, and it’s either age or heat that had me thinking Olive needs to just have a chat with her best friend and let her live her life. The book would have been one chapter if I’d written it. I’ll still watch the movie, so it’s not like I didn’t enjoy it. I just really want to teach Olive how to be assertive. There’s a book for that, Olive!

Now I’m starting Building 903 by Lois Lowry. It’s out in September, and her opening letter says she’s written books under a pseudonym. Now all I can think is that I need to Google this and figure out what else she’s written. Are they adult books? Children’s books? What have you been writing, Lois Lowry? Because apparently I need to read it.

What are you focusing on in this last gasp of summer that will not end?