my summer of failure

an ode to a season of contradictions

Labor Day Weekend always marked the end of summer for me. It’s been nearly a decade since I lived and died by the academic calendar year, but even my corporate work environments harbored vestigial elements of school. While Biglaw doesn’t have Summer Fridays (can you imagine??), summer associates heralded three months of longer lunches, Shakespeare in the Park, and happy hours at 6pm. Summer was relatively more relaxed, the longer days stretching deliciously into temperate nights. The season of festivals, anime conventions, and open-air concerts.

But summer is also the season of extracurricular improvement. In middle school, I’d get sent to a rotation of speech and debate or math camps. My mother assigned me five-paragraph essays to write—daily. High school summers harkened the era of part-time jobs—sales associate (or “model” if you worked at Abercrombie or Hollister), store associate (if you worked at In-n-Out or Target), generic worker (if you worked somewhere with no formal title, like I did)—and visiting friends at their part-time jobs. We squirreled away money from summer employment for the academic year, crushed bills for energy drink addictions or the continually changing trend cycles.

College ushered in the idea of extracurricular improvement on steroids. It wasn’t enough to simply have a job over the summer; one had to have the right kind of job, one that would signal to future employers that you’ve been laser-focused on that job in finance, consulting, tech, medicine, law, government, NGO, media, etc. since you’ve been sentient.

Summers in college were the first time I noticed the public school vs. private school divide: while it was typical for my friends at UCs to stick around school and take classes over the summer, it was practically unheard of at Yale. On the off-chance one did take summer classes instead of obtaining summer employment, they tended to be language or cultural classes in exotic locales like Croatia or Japan. These summers were displays of conspicuous education or conspicuous employment—classes and jobs like others undertook, yes, but of a quality which distinguished them from “normal” classes and “normal” jobs.

This is the first summer since I was 18 that I did not strive for conspicuous extracurricular improvement. Even after I left the corporate sphere, I spent my first summer obsessing over my book proposal and my second summer devoted to finishing the second draft.

This summer, I did none of that.

Instead, I’d wake before my alarm and lay there. Lay and wonder how it was possible to have done everything “right” and still feel like such a failure. Lay and wonder if there is a place for me in this world. Then I’d sink into that feeling of humiliation and not enough like quicksand. I become convinced that if those criticisms swaddle me, suffocate me, I can be cocooned and eventually emerge on the other end, metamorphosed.

When my book deal fell apart, I entered a deep depression. At first, I was intent on salvaging the situation straight away—what if I didn’t sleep or see friends or do anything else all of May, so I could intensely work and then go on submission in June? This book was a huge gaping—not to mention extremely public—hole in my life. My anxiety couldn’t bear to look at it, think of it, read about it on Reddit. I needed to fix it ASAP.

Except I couldn’t. I simply could not work fast enough, my mind could not ideate as quickly as I wanted it to. June rolled around. Although I’d received comments on the first draft of my proposal from my agent, I knew it was nowhere near ready for primetime.

So I did something uncharacteristic: I gave up. I accepted that I had failed and, in many people’s eyes (including my own), I was a failure.