My Summer List

From dumpster diving to London

My parents are retiring in June.

Not “taking time off” retiring. “Putting everything in storage, traveling the world for six months, we’ll be in London in July, do you want to come?” retiring.

My first reaction was something between excited and anxious. A gift and a problem, arriving at the same time. They’re also the only immediate family I have left, so watching them go — even to somewhere beautiful, even somewhere I get to visit — hits different than it probably looks from the outside.

I said yes. Of course I said yes. And then I opened my Amazon app.

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Here is what my summer actually looks like:

Two summer classes. Client work for M2M. North Signal content. Networking events. A restaurant schedule. A two-week trip to London where I will also be doing all of the above from a different time zone. And somewhere in there, a patio that has been a plant graveyard since we moved in that I am determined to turn into a place where I can sit down with a book and not feel guilty about it.

That’s the list. And if I’m being honest, looking at it makes me feel something I don’t say out loud very often.

I’m tired of pushing through.

Not burned out. Not quitting anything. Just tired in the way that happens when you’ve been running on forward momentum for so long that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to actually stop. I don’t have a week to reset. I don’t even have a weekend. There’s always school, or a shift, or a deliverable, or just the general weight of being an adult who is also building something while also trying to get a degree while also keeping myself and a cat alive.

The break I need doesn’t fit in my schedule. So instead, I’m doing something different.

I’m putting the things that are just for me on the calendar like tasks.

Not “I’ll get to it when things slow down.” Things don’t slow down. Patio: Saturday morning. Book: 45 minutes before bed. London: I’m going, I’m working while I’m there, and I’m also going to walk somewhere without my phone for at least an hour every day because my parents are seeing the world for the first time without jobs waiting for them and I want to actually be present for that.

I love the destinations. I hate the traveling. I’m anxious about it. I’ve been researching everything I can to make myself as comfortable as possible on the flight, in the country, in the schedule. But underneath the logistics, there’s something I keep coming back to.

My parents did the thing. They built the life, they did the work, and now they’re doing this. I’m watching what that looks like from the beginning.

My mom sacrificed a lot to get here. I was the runt of the family in a lot of ways. My stepsiblings had college paid for before they graduated private high school. My sister took private jets to other countries for vacations. Meanwhile I was jumping in dumpsters collecting bottles and cans to pay for club soccer. We weren’t poor — we always had food, always had what we needed. But I went to a school where kids got BMWs for their sixteenth birthday and I got a 2006 Toyota Camry, and I knew the difference.

I’m not bitter about it. I actually think it made me. But watching my parents pack up their whole life into storage and leave for six months does something to you when you’re still in the part where you’re figuring out how to financially survive without them. It feels like the clock got louder.

That’s what’s underneath the summer list. Not ambition for ambition’s sake. I just really, really want to build the life I want. Like they did.

I don’t want to get there and realize I never let myself rest along the way.

So the patio gets done. London counts as both work and rest. The summer list is long and I’m going to do all of it.

That’s the plan. As always thank you so much for reading! See you next Tuesday!

— Sydney