September Anxiety Starts in August

There's a specific kind of dread that arrives in the third week of August.

It's not depression. It's not summer-ending melancholy, though that's there too. It's the particular sensation of a well-organised person looking at the month ahead and seeing the work before the work begins.

September requires everything. It requires the resumption of every routine that summer suspended, plus the establishment of new ones, plus the administration that accrued over six weeks of everyone being somewhere different. The back-to-school lists, the new-term forms, the calendar synchronisation, the first-week-of-school logistics that look simple from the outside and are, in reality, a series of small operational decisions that need to be made correctly or the week goes wrong.

I have been managing this alone for long enough that my body starts anticipating it in August.

What I'm trying to do — and this is genuinely a project, not a thought I've had — is spread the September dread. Shared anticipation is lighter than solo anticipation. If two people have looked at the month ahead and both feel the mild weight of it, the weight halves. If one person is dreading it and the other is unaware that anything is coming, the dread concentrates.

He sat down with me and the September calendar last Sunday. We went through it together.

He said: that's a lot.

Yes, I said. It is.