“What does summer mean to me?” was always the first question on the first page of a new schoolbook. A trap disguised as a creative writing prompt. You were meant to produce something sun-soaked and mildly mythic: tales of the Aegean or at least a ferry to Calais. But what if you’d just spent six weeks stress-eating Wotsits and watching CBBC in a hot room?
Some kids wrote about sailing in Greece or “really bonding with Grandpa in Tuscany”. Others said they “found themselves” in Cornwall. I once wrote a full-page lie about learning to surf in Devon, despite the fact that I can’t swim in a straight line and once cried on a pedal boat in Swanage.
The truth? I was lucky in many ways – holidays, heat, even the occasional Ryanair flight with my name on it. But still, the question always felt loaded. “What did you do this summer?” quickly became “Who did you become this summer?” And if you hadn’t had a glow-up, a coming-of-age moment, or at least a near-death jet ski incident, had you even summered?
Some summers were spectacularly uneventful. Some were sad, angsty, heavy with a side of sunburn and the long, low ache of not being invited to things. Other summers were breakthroughs. The kind where you pick up a textbook in August like it’s a love letter to your future self.
Then came the chaotic ones. The international ones. Where you learned how to say “hospital” in Spanish and why monsoon season is not, in fact, a cute aesthetic. I spent one summer in Nicaragua, watching the sea roll in on Ometepe Island and realising that no great spiritual revelation comes from a bug bite and a bad haircut, but you do come away with a new kind of clarity.
Summer teaches perspective – badly. It crashes motorbikes, calls insurance companies, and makes you apologise to your parents for things they didn’t even know you did. It throws you into deep conversations with strangers who seem wiser than you until you realise they’re also 19, lost, and googling “what is foreign transaction fee”.
Summer is a contradiction in motion. It’s epiphanies in hostel bathrooms. It’s BuzzFeed quizzes at 3am and pretentious conversations about Dali on a boat with a leak. It’s your third cocktail and your fifth rebrand. It’s a season for lying to yourself (gently), romanticising yourself (aggressively), and reinventing yourself (clumsily). It’s a time to be someone else or maybe just more yourself than usual.
So I don’t have a clean answer to the question. But I do have this: summer is self-mythology on a sweaty timeline. It’s always a little cringe in hindsight, but necessary. Summer, for me, is the bridge between the person I was trying to be and the person I might accidentally become. And that’s probably more than my Year 3 teacher bargained for.
