A Season of Feeling
How to Embrace Summer: Eat Plants, Watch the Zoomers, and Listen to Japanese Breakfast.
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…