Introducing Sick Girl Summer

Apparently, this year, we should all be having a brat girl summer.

I’ve given it some thought and decided I can’t really be bothered.

I think I had a brat girl summer in 1997, before every summer had to have a theme. It was definitely the summer I remember sleeping on someone's couch in my clothes and then walking to Sainsburys barefoot at 9am for a croissant before impulsively going to Brighton to go bowling in the same clothes. That feels quite brat. At least it feels like my geriatric Millennial/Xennial understanding of what a brat summer is supposed to be.

Somewhere out there, though, is a Gen Z girl wearing lime green nail polish sneering at me because no one born before the year 2000 was ever hedonistic, messy, or, dare I say it, even a tiny bit cool. She would be super jealous of the lime green mini skirt I used to wear clubbing, though.

Anyway, I have decided that brat summer sounds tiring, as does a hot girl summer. In fact, summer, in general, is pretty tiring. It’s still light at 9pm, which is waaay past bedtime, it’s too hot to do anything unless you want to get up early or stay up late, which is obviously tiring, and we’re somehow expected to make time and energy for things like holidays, which, as everyone secretly knows, are INCREDIBLY tiring, both to plan and take.

If you’re living with any kind of chronic illness, then just plodding along with a normal day is tiring, let alone having the kind of mental or physical energy to worry about whether your summer is aesthetic enough for Tik Tok and Instagram. So I’m afraid I will be having a Sick Girl Summer, which is the same kind of summer as I’ve been having every year since 2021.

The rules of Sick Girl Summer are simple.

1. Stay indoors a lot

2. Sleep a lot

3. Complain a lot

Sick girl summer is sleeping on the couch with the blinds drawn and a fan 6 inches from your face. It’s making and cancelling engagements because the heat melted the last of your remaining spoons. It’s checking the weather forecast several times a day to see how hot the unairconditioned waiting room at the hospital will be. It’s planning a single exciting summer event, then planning how much recovery time you’ll need afterwards before you can do something else fun. Most of all, for me anyway, sick girl summer is watching yourself turn into a massive fun sponge while everyone else enjoys the sunshine and plans barbecues.

I will confess to never having been a huge fan of hot weather in my pre-cancer years, but I would get up early and go running, enjoy late nights in a beer garden, have enough energy to enjoy an activity in the sunshine AND complain about how hot it is.

So far in my sick girl era, I have not been enjoying summer at all. July and August have felt like huge, looming, glasses sliding down my nose, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” stress balls, which I spend counting down to Autumn. 3 years in and I’m still not sure how to deal with summer. Do I lean into my sick girl summer? Refuse all social engagements and let myself slowly turn into mush in front of a portable air con unit. But my fun Autumn activities, like walking a Marathon, all seem to demand that I spend Summer preparing for them. Maybe I should fight back like a military campaign? Buy the £180 cooling headband I saw Olympians wearing, a neck fan, parasol, huge sunglasses, and put ice packs in my bra? Maybe I should act more like sensible mediterraneans? Rise early, accomplish many things before the heat of the day gets going, and then sleep all afternoon. Perhaps I should Summer in Norway in the same way that rich Americans summer in the Hamptons.

Those could all be great solutions, but sadly, the reality of sick girl summer is that I barrel into July convinced that THIS YEAR WILL BE DIFFERENT, and by the time it’s become apparent that it isn’t, I mostly lack the mental and physical capacity to make any of them work. So I guess I’ll keep doing what I’ve done every year, make plans I won’t have the energy to enjoy and will make me so tired it will ruin all my other plans, ruin everyone else plans by bitching about how hot and sweaty I am, trying to decide if I’m ill or just hot and miserable, and careering from mental crisis to emotional meltdown like a sweaty and irritable pinball.

See you in September.