I Don’t Summer as a Verb

The hidden cost of choosing performance over pleasure

My toxic trait is that I love rainy days.

I said what I said. A rainy day gives you permission to stay in.

It’s July and I feel the pressure to summer so hard.

Social media is relentlessly pushing me to have something to show for my summer. Bare shoulders, flip flops, beach waves, evidence of my commitment to the unbridled joie de vivre that magically appears on June 21 or thereabouts.

June 21 may be the first day of summer but it’s also the longest day of the year. There’s a lot of time to fill, a lot of daylight hours in which to prove you’re summering hard enough.

The truth is, I don’t summer as a verb.

I don’t want to prove anything to anyone. I want summer to be all about pleasure, about soaking up the good things, savoring and tasting the deliciousness of being alive.

So I started thinking about what pleasure actually means to me.

And the more I thought about pleasure, the less this turned out to be about summer.

…

Somewhere along the way, performance started to matter more than pleasure. Not just in July, but in life.

It would be easy and convenient to blame social media, the highlight reel that transforms regular day-to-day existence into a shiny narrative with photographic proof of a life well-lived. But this started long before Instagram likes and comments became the judge and jury of whether we were doing life the right way.

Because performance shows up in places where Instagram doesn’t go.

When he asks if everything’s ok, and you’re not ok but you say, I’m fine. When he dismisses your feelings, and you let it go because saying the true thing would ruin the whole evening. When you fake the orgasm.

They all performs the same line: Everything is great. Look at me, happy, fulfilled, multi-orgasmic.

If you’re really good at it, you can even convince yourself with your performance. You can become so deeply invested in the version of your life that you present to the world, that you start to believe it. You can no longer tell the difference between performance and reality.

It feels warm and cozy in that place where life is a highlight reel. And that’s the trap.

…

That performance is protection.

Long before you had words for it, your body learned that being real wasn’t safe. It might cost you love, belonging, or peace of mind. So you created a mask, and you got so good at wearing it that you lost track of the fact that it wasn’t your actual face.

Your nervous system did exactly what it was designed to do. It kept you safe.

It also kept you disconnected from what was real, from what your own body knew.

The other day I saw a photo I’d posted years ago that showed me in a happy relationship, beachy, tan, relaxed, smiling softly in my gauzy white coverup.

I remember that trip. He’d made me coffee each morning, but he kept hiding his phone screen, flipping it over whenever I was nearby. A tug in my belly clocked it, while the rest of me looked the other way, deeply needing everything to be as good on the inside as it looked on the outside. The story I told myself protected me from the uncertainty of what my body knew.

When the relationship blew up months later, I was blindsided. Except I wasn’t, because my body had been telling me for months. I just hadn’t listened.

I believed my own performance.

I summered so hard, I forgot what was real.

…

Last weekend, I visited a lake where friends own a home. I didn’t schlep all the way there for a picture. I stood at the edge of the water, felt the rocks beneath my bare feet, the cold water on my skin.

I stayed there long enough to feel my body exhale. To simply be there in my own experience. No audience, no applause, no iPhone. Just me and the lake.

Pleasure is a state your body enters when it finally trusts that it’s safe enough to stop bracing. When you stop needing the performance to prove your life is worth living.

There are no pictures from that day, and I’m fine with that. Because I know it was real.

xo

Nina