When I was growing up, I remember sometimes feeling a little sadness even though the skies were sunny and the days were warm. It wouldn’t last long; more of a fleeting longing for…something. And then I was outdoors again, playing at the park, climbing trees, riding my bike. That feeling, that feeling of wistfulness I didn’t yet have a name for, replaced with the sounds of the ice cream truck and my bike on the gravel.
I think about that feeling, almost of emptiness, from time to time. The summer months are a trigger. And it turns out I’m not alone in that. Psychologists have a name for it: seasonal nostalgia. The team at Restoration Psychology describes it this way: “a wistful reflection on the passing of time, triggered by the changing seasons.” Summer in particular tends to stir it up, because the season is loaded with so much: vacations, long evenings, gatherings, freedom. When it arrives, it brings the past along with it.
For many, the summer is the start of thankfully long sunny days, warm nights, and time at the pool. Graduation photos fill up Facebook, school is out, and somewhere down the street, someone fires up a grill. There’s a vacation on the calendar, or a promise of a weekend at the lake.
For some, all of this might bring something a little deeper than the fleeting feeling of seasonal nostalgia—something that doesn’t go away after your cookout.
Summer SAD
Most of us know about seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, the form of depression that arrives in fall and lifts in spring. What’s less talked about is its summer version. The National Institute of Mental Health describes Summer SAD as depressive episodes that occur during the spring and summer months for at least two consecutive years. It’s less common than winter SAD, but very real for the people who have it.
Summer SAD can show up as loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, weight loss, and anxiety—different from the carb-craving, hibernation-mode of winter depression, but just as serious. If summer reliably brings on changes that go past wistfulness, that’s worth a conversation with a doctor.
The lines between seasonal nostalgia, SAD, and grief often blur. Grief and depression can travel together. Seasonal sadness can deepen into something more. What matters is recognizing what you’re carrying. And treating it like it matters.
A graduation where one seat in the audience should have been theirs. The first family vacation without him. An empty lawn chair at the cookout. The kids home from school, and the parent who isn’t there to take them to the pool. Father’s Day on the calendar. A wedding she would have loved. The long, light evening when you used to call her.
These are not big public moments. They’re small, private ones. Which is part of what makes them so hard to talk about. I cried in the car on the way to the graduation party isn’t something most people want to say out loud in June.
A Cloud Across the Sun
Winter grief makes sense to people. The short days, the gray sky, the cold—it all looks the part. Nobody questions a person for feeling heavy in February. Summer grief is different. Summer is supposed to be the fun season. The easy one. So when the season arrives, and you don’t feel any of it, the mismatch becomes its own kind of pain.
Grief researcher Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief, which is grief that the world around you isn’t making room for. He was writing about losses that don’t get formal recognition, like the death of an ex-spouse or a miscarriage. But the framework fits any grief that goes underground because the moment doesn’t allow for it. Summer is one of those moments. The loss is real. In a season that doesn’t seem built for it.
The grief educators at What’s Your Grief have written about this in the context of triggers—the way scents, light, and routines can stir up loss without warning. A whiff of charcoal smoke. The first time the air smells like cut grass. A song on the radio that reminds you of a different summer.
The Tyranny of the Shoulds, Summer Edition
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again—people tend to internalize rules about how things should be when they’re experiencing the opposite. The psychoanalyst Karen Horney called this the tyranny of the shoulds.
Summer has its own shoulds.
You should be at the cookout. You should be in the graduation photo. You should be loving these long evenings. You should be making memories with your kids. You should be over it by now.
When your reality doesn’t match the script, the disconnect can be exhausting. You start going through the motions. Smiling at the cookout, showing up to the pool, posting the photo—instead of giving yourself any room to feel what you actually feel. The performance can wear you out faster than the grief itself.
There’s actually a name for this. The team at Balanced Wellness calls it grief masking, which is hiding what you feel so that the people around you stay comfortable. It’s a survival skill, and not always a healthy one. It can get you through the day, the cookout, the graduation. But over time, the masking is what wears people out. Grief is hard enough without trying to hide it.
When the Person Who Made It Summer Is Gone
In the song The Boys of Summer, Don Henley sings about driving down an empty road, past an empty beach and an empty lake, watching “the sun go down alone.” While this song is about lost love, the imagery is the season itself, that hollowed-out quality summer can take on when the person who made it—well, summer—is gone.
Summer also asks more of you socially than other seasons do. There are pool parties, graduations, weddings, reunions, Fourth of July. Each one is a small public event where your loss becomes more tangible—to you, if not to anyone else. A holiday gathering once a year is hard enough. A whole season of them is something else.
What Might Help
A few things might help you get through a summer that doesn’t feel like one.
- Give yourself permission to step back—from the cookout, from the pool party, from the obligations that can drain you. Brené Brown defines boundaries plainly: your list of what’s okay and what’s not okay. Boundaries don’t make you a bad guest. They make you an honest one.
- Tell one person. Not the whole story. Just one sentence: This is a hard summer. You’d be surprised how often the person you tell will say, “Me too.”
- If the day brings up something heavier, such as grief that lingers, a wave that doesn’t pass, a grief counselor can help. Grief therapist Megan Devine, whose work has shaped how a lot of us think about loss, has built her whole career on a single idea: some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. Summer is one of those things, for some people, in some years.
- The Psychology Today therapist directory is a good place to start if you’re looking for someone local.
One More Thing
I think about that kid version of me sometimes. The one who felt a little sad in the middle of a sunny day and didn’t know why.
That feeling didn’t last because kids move on quickly. But it was real while it was there. Whatever made me feel it then—the passing of time, the bigness of summer, something I couldn’t name—was real enough that I remember it now, decades later.
But I think I recognized something back then that I’m only now able to put into words. Sometimes a beautiful day has a quieter feeling running underneath it. That doesn’t make the day less beautiful. It just makes it more honest.
If summer feels heavier than it looks this year, you’re not doing it wrong. The kid version of me felt this much without being able to name it. What I’d tell her now—what I’d tell you—is that sometimes the sun is out, and you’re still allowed to feel what you feel, even if it doesn’t match the season.
Carrie Campbell, Blog Contributor