Wake Me Up When September Ends
So, I know it’s not exactly September just yet…but this Green Day song kind of succinctly sums up my feelings about this time of year. I wish I could pull a Bo Burnham and shut myself off for, like, 40 days*, just long enough to get through the last gasps of August and the whole month of September. Then, I’d turn on again the first of October and continue on from there.
Let me explain (bear with me). I’m a person who gets a period, but it doesn’t have a regular cycle and hasn’t since the first time I got it.** I could go up to four months without having one, and I can never plan for when it’s going to happen. But — if I start feeling weird, more depressed or irritated than usual, and I wake up one morning to find that my uterus has shed a lining, my first reaction isn’t exactly Fuck! I’ve ruined another pair of underwear!*** It’s actually a flood of relief. So that’s why I’ve been an absolute cretin this week! Then, I go about my day, dealing with the cramps and the mood swings, but without all the guilt and helplessness I might have felt even just the evening before. Whether this is scientifically backed or not, it feels so much better to have a reason for a state of uneasiness that I can point to, even retrospectively, and say, Well, duh! It helps to know that sometimes my body knows what’s up before my brain does. And when my brain catches up to my body, whatever bad feelings I’ve been wrestling with become easier to process and move through.
I believe trauma lives in the body, and that it can present in many different ways. The body remembers even when the brain works hard to replace memory, or keep it tucked away somewhere we can’t easily access it. When you really think about it, we humans are miraculous creatures with all the involuntary systems in place that keep us going and keep us safe. We don’t think about pumping blood through our heart to the rest of our organs, we just do it. We don’t just decide to dream, parts of our brains are specifically designed to manage that for us, in order to process events and organize memories. We are our consciousness, but we’re also so much else…
Around this time of year, my body tries to tell me something. I find myself slipping into an irritability that is hard to shake off or ration away. I succumb to darker thoughts. I self-isolate. I feel like I don’t like anyone or anything. I lash out at loved ones, I stop caring about things I care about, I get annoyed at the tiniest, most insignificant missteps, I lose patience and the ability to grant grace to people for their “mistakes.”
“I just feel like my heart is full of this darkness. I have such a negative outlook right now,” I told my girlfriend last night****. And then it hit me. We’re in the last days of August. Next month is September. Well, I think to myself, duh!
My body, as I started learning at 15, follows cycles. The odd uneven time of August through September is another cycle for mine established five years ago when my mother was actively dying — death being another cycle my body will go through someday, too. Every year since 2016, around this time, the grief that is always with me spikes to a fever pitch and I’m brought to that first time it happened, its nexus, once more. There’s a lump in my throat, a heaviness in my stomach, a darkness in my heart that makes me not just sad, but angry. I carry my grief like the physical, visceral thing it can sometimes be.
And then…my brain catches up. I look at the calendar and I take a deep breath and I nod to myself and I think, Okay, I know what this is, I’ve been here before, I just have to be strong enough to get through, and I will be because I have been. And just like that, whatever bad feelings I’ve been wrestling with become easier to process and move through.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
X
Sam
P.S. Next week, an essay I wrote about my mother will be live on Entropy. I’m excited and nervous to share something so personal and important to me. It seems like kismet that it should find a home in September.
Notes:
*Let’s keep it biblical, baby!
**Ninth grade lit class, baby!
***That’s the second reaction :)
****Everyone should be so lucky to have a Caitlin in their lives.
