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Reluctant Return: On Freedom, Habit, and the Weight of Workplace Expectations

Remember those blissful summer days in June when we were just kids, and September felt so far away?

I can still feel that summer sun on my face, its spill of secrets, the warm, confident trust offering what no one else could—safety, tangible on my skin.

So long as the summer sun was charged and glowing, it held at bay my fear of returning to school, of leaving that cocooned pocket of time, for the larger reality of “regular” life, inside which I felt incompatible and ill-prepared to face without a manual.

Time is a promise of reliability, never stated, but always seen. Time is the rise and fall in temperature, light, hunger, energy level, elasticity, invisible scales, the seesaw that sees your childhood lifting and lowering. Adults will inevitably fail you, but the sun won’t—it won’t leave you forever in the dark. Every day is religious—each one is always reborn.

Whether you were a city kid, running through the hard spray shooting out from an open fire hydrant, pulling leeches from your skin after swimming in the camp lake, or rinsing sand off your hands and feet in the community foot shower at the public beach, the summer sun seeped into all of us.

We felt time slow down, bedtime pushing farther away, and the possibility of what could be discovered before the darkness swelled.

As we went about our summer business, the days grew imperceptibly shorter, and before we knew it, it was August, and the days slipped earlier and easier from our grip.

Safety once lay warm on our body, replaced by a breeze, prickling its unmistakable melancholy as the approaching return to “regular” life and the weekdays we would no longer control. And underneath that, another feeling—dread.

Those weeks leading up to my return to school in September expressed themselves inside me as sensations. The consistent late summer smells became landmarks in the air, markers that kicked up my dusty apprehension. Independent of touch or interaction, my inner world is entangled with the world outside me, separated but connected.

The singe and hiss of heat underneath an iron press at Johnny’s T-Shirt City transferring decals permanently onto the skin of kids’ cotton Hanes tees also transferred permanency inside me.

To this day, I still feel it. In this, I am not alone. The strange, sad homesickness of returning to school after the summer remains with many people well into adulthood, perhaps forever.

And now, here we are, after two years of staying at home, with the unmistakable mist of dread marked by summer’s end.

Only, it’s not summer.

As we pretend the pandemic is winding down to a natural conclusion (it is not), many of us are being called back to work. Some of us are excited, but many are encased in a familiar low-grade dread. What is this dread called? When have we felt it before?

It’s so familiar, but many of us struggle to name it.

My theory?

My most profound insights don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These deeper dives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

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