Sama Farrag POV: It’s the end of August, you’re a fully grown adult with no summer assignments, no first day of school, no timetable to memorise, yet somehow you still feel like you’re about to be told that summer is over and you forgot to do something.
I get it every year, and every year it catches me off guard because there is no logical reason for it to be happening. I can be having a completely normal day, doing something as unremarkable as lying in bed, making plans for the evening or scrolling through Twitter without even really looking at anything, and then this peculiar little wave comes over me; I feel restless, vaguely guilty and inexplicably conscious of time, as though there is something approaching that I should be preparing for, even though I have absolutely no idea what that thing is. It’s not really anxiety about anything in particular and that is what makes it so annoying.
There is no crisis to solve and no immediate problem hiding underneath the feeling, just a familiar sense that I have somehow missed a crucial deadline that does not exist. I will check my calendar, check my messages, mentally run through everything I have coming up, and eventually have to accept that nothing has happened. I am just experiencing what I have coined Phantom August Anxiety: the residue panic of the back-to-school impending doom. Except now I am twenty-six, employed, and there is no school to go back to.
For most of us, August was never allowed to exist as just August. It was always the end-of-summer month that arrived with a countdown, the period when summer was still happening but you could feel the adults around you slowly preparing to snatch it away. June felt endless, July felt like a never ending Midnight Sun (wink wink), but August had a slightly different vibe because somewhere in the distance there was always September, and September meant back to school (and my birthday, which is irrelevant to the story, but it always landed on the first day of school).
The change was gradual at first. You would start hearing people mention when school was starting again, someone would bring up our summer reading assignment or buying uniforms, school supplies would replace tanning oils and flamingo floaties in every shop, and eventually the phrase “back to school” would begin appearing everywhere until it felt like this looming doomsday-esque event. Even if you liked school, there was still something about going back that made you feel uneasy.
The first day back came with the sheer terror of walking into a room where everyone had supposedly been living a separate life without you for three months, and you had to catch up before anyone noticed you were catching up, because we have to start reading Oedipus immediately. There were new teachers, new classes, new seating plans, new haircuts, new alliances, and, most importantly, a deeply serious investigation into who was still friends with whom. Someone had inevitably fallen out, someone else had suddenly become inseparable, and there was always at least one person who had undergone a completely unexplained personality transformation over the summer. Before you had even unpacked your bag, you were already conducting reconnaissance: Who broke-up with who? Who stopped following who? When did she get bangs? And, perhaps most importantly to our fickle teenage minds, did the person you spent the entirety of last year trying to impress even notice that you were gone? It sounds completely insane now, but when school is your entire universe, these things carry the weight of international diplomacy. It’s pure politics.
And I think this is the part of August anxiety that is easy to miss when we describe it as a simple and fleeting feeling of end-of-summer dread. The feeling is not necessarily that you miss school, or even that you are particularly nostalgic for being young; it is that your brain spent years being trained to associate this exact stretch of the calendar with a very specific kind of anticipation, where something was coming whether you liked it or not and you had better be prepared with your Book in a Bag assignment that you have not even started on.
That kind of conditioning is difficult to shake when it has been repeated every single year for most of your childhood. You can spend the other eleven months perfectly aware that you are no longer a student and that your life has nothing to do with school calendars and that the most pressing thing on your September agenda is probably answering an email you have been ignoring since last Tuesday, but August arrives and some primitive little corner of your brain starts clearing its desk. It is almost Pavlovian, except instead of a bell, it is the sight of a ridiculous display of pencil cases in a supermarket.
And there are other little things that seem to contribute to it. The weather is still hot, but the nights begin to feel slightly different. People start returning from holidays. Restaurants and shops slowly but surely begin introducing autumn things before anyone has given them permission to. You start hearing “next month” more often. Even the group chat changes tone; someone is saying, “We need to do something before summer ends,” as though we have been living under a government-mandated summer deadline.
The strange thing is that I don’t think the anxiety is actually about going back. It is about the feeling that you are supposed to be somewhere else by now. That distinction matters, because I can’t say I miss school in any meaningful sense; I certainly do not miss waking up before sunrise, carrying a backpack that weighed a tonne, or discovering at 7:43 a.m. that the physics homework I was absolutely going to do the night before had remained untouched on my desk. What lingers is the expectation of being prepared for a new phase, even when nobody has told you what the new phase is.
I notice it most in the way I start looking at my own life from a slight distance, as though August has turned me into an unwilling observer of myself. I start wondering whether I am where I thought I would be at twenty-six, whether I am doing enough, whether the year has gone quickly because I have actually been busy or because I have simply been moving through it on autopilot. These are questions I could ask myself at literally any point during the year, of course, but there is something about late August that makes them feel incredibly urgent.
Maybe it’s because I used to have an answer. There was always a next grade, a next term, a next classroom. You did not have to know what you were doing with your life because someone had already decided what came next. Your only responsibility was to show up with the correct books and, ideally, not get detention before October.
There is a particular comfort in having your life divided for you. I did not appreciate it at the time, obviously. At fifteen, the idea of having somebody else determine when your year began and ended felt oppressive; now, the concept of being handed a schedule and being told exactly where I need to be at 9:15 on a Monday morning sounds perfect. Adult life has far too many blank spaces and nobody tells you when you are supposed to reinvent yourself, when you are supposed to slow down, and when you are supposed to have figured something out. You just keep going, and occasionally realise you have been going for quite a while. To quote Taylor Swift, “you’re on your own, kid.”
That might be why the back-to-school season has such an odd hold on people who have been out of school for years. It is one of the few times when the world around us still behaves as though there is a universal reset coming. You see children buying supplies, universities reopening, parents complaining about traffic, people discussing September plans, and for a very brief moment, the old structure becomes visible again. I think I respond to that structure before I even consciously register it. It is less “I have to go back to school” and more “Oh. Right. This is the part where everyone gets their life together.” Which is, frankly, an unreasonable amount of pressure to put on a month.
And maybe that is why the feeling has always seemed so disproportionate to me. There is something almost embarrassing about realising that a supermarket aisle full of notebooks can make you feel vaguely inadequate and send me into an existential crisis. You can be perfectly happy with your life and still get that tiny internal voice asking what you have achieved lately, what you are doing next, or whether you are keeping up. It is not a particularly profound question, but it has a very effective way of making you feel as though you should have an answer prepared. I don’t think I do. I think I have just spent enough years associating August with preparation that I still instinctively start preparing for something.
The difference now is that there is nothing specific to prepare for, which leaves me with all this nervous energy and nowhere obvious to put it. So I make unnecessary plans. I start thinking about rearranging things. I become convinced I should finally sort out the drawer I have been avoiding since 2022. I look at September as though it might arrive with an instruction manual, but it never does.
And perhaps that is the part of growing up nobody really talks about: eventually, the things that once gave your life its structure disappear, but your instincts do not disappear at quite the same speed. You can know intellectually that you are free from the old calendar while still feeling, somewhere deep down, that August is a warning. Maybe that is all Phantom August Anxiety is – a leftover alarm.
Not particularly useful, not entirely logical, and certainly not worth panicking over – but still capable of going off every year, right on schedule.
