Have you ever felt sad in the summer? Seen your deep-down grief juxtaposed against a sunny sky and wondered What’s wrong with me?

When the weather is lovely and everyone’s off on holiday, it can be hard to process and honour our painful feelings. Sometimes, it’s even difficult to get beyond the idea that we “should” be feeling fabulous, on the beach, in the middle of August. For some of us, though, our emotional range and intensity (our ability to experience intense joy and sorrow, and a million other things) are some of our greatest assets. And they don’t always take the summer off.

Giving ourselves permission to feel whatever we’re feeling is a gift. Human bodies, minds, and lives don’t often follow the exact same rhythms. We are all so different from one another! Yet, because of the way our society and economy are set up, summer sadness seems to trigger a special kind of loneliness. It can feel like being set apart from everyone—like being lost at sea while everyone else relaxes on the shore. If we can stop feeling bad about feeling bad, perhaps it would be easier to see what our emotional turbulence can teach us about ourselves and the world.

Get cozy with your strong emotions

A while ago, I shared Elizabeth’s wonderful post Grieving Every Day. As someone for whom sadness is a recurring presence in her life, Elizabeth tries to incorporate honoring these feelings into each day. I admire how she’s sought to build up her relationship with these feelings, learning to coexist with them and understand their value:

Some pain is personal and individual and recognising individual pain and its cause can be very important. But some pain might be universal and this kind of pain may need a different approach. Overall I believe we need to rethink our relationship with pain and sadness and not see them as villains to be conquered or avoided.

If we intimately know our grief, it’s less likely to throw us off, even if it shows up unexpectedly.

Sadness is not necessarily random

For some of us, summer is an especially difficult time. If you have experienced a trauma in your past, strong emotions may be triggered by certain holidays, kinds of weather, or seasonal activities. These can be really subtle, and we may not even see the connections between our surroundings and our emotions at first.

Physiological responses to light and temperature can also affect our moods, especially if we’re highly sensitive to environmental stimuli to begin with. You might be familiar with Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is commonly thought of as a kind of “winter blues,” but about a tenth of people with SAD actually experience it in the summer. Having a hard time with the warm summer months is pretty normal. It doesn’t make you no fun, and it doesn’t mean you’re broken.

How are you feeling today?

How has summer been for you this year? Are you sad to see it go, or relieved that autumn will soon be here? What patterns can you see in the way your heart moves through the year?