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A Season of Feeling

A Season of Feeling

How to Embrace Summer: Eat Plants, Watch the Zoomers, and Listen to Japanese Breakfast.

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Anna Haines
Jul 04, 2021
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A Season of Feeling
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©Sarah Messinger for The New York Times

Last week, I described how my annual summertime sadness was ushered in by a dead baby racoon on my doorstep. After the city came to take the poor thing away, I went for an evening stroll. Amidst the dim, cool light of dusk, I noticed a strange shift in my emotional state—I felt noticeably sad. Had I really grown attached to an animal that spent no more than an hour in my consciousness? My surprise at the all-to-familiar pang of grief, was immediately met with a sense of optimism. I was feeling something!

It’s easy when you’re depressed to not realize you’ve stopped feeling with intensity. It’s not that the emotions don’t come, they do, but they become flatline, like a passing thought I’m noticing occur in someone else’s body, rather than a feeling that pulses through my own. I tend to alternate between phases of living in this muted state and being hyper-anxious, and it’s only when I’m out of the former, that I realize how emotionally numb I’d bec…

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