Everybody’s posting their adorable first-day-of-school pictures this week.
Meanwhile, I’m looking like an absolute troll walking my dogs while the neighborhood is outside taking family photos at 7:20 AM.
Everyone knows who the neighborhood spinster is now. 🥴 I guess I didn’t get the memo to wait an extra 15 minutes.
I don’t have kids. My September doesn’t involve school supply lists, drop-offs, new teachers, or discovering at 9 PM that somebody needs poster board by tomorrow morning.
And yet, I can still feel the shift. There’s something about September that collectively feels like:
Alright. Fun’s over. Back to real life.
And I started wondering… Why the fuck do we do that?
Why have we collectively decided summer is when we’re allowed to have a little more space — and September is when we’re supposed to tighten everything back up again?
· · ·
Somewhere along the way, summer became our permission slip...
- Leave work early.
- Sit outside longer.
- Take the trip.
- Have dinner be whatever the hell is in the fridge.
- Leave a weekend open.
- Say, “Eh, we’ll figure it out.”
And most importantly, we don’t feel nearly as guilty about it.
Then Labor Day hits and suddenly it’s time to get serious again.
Calendars fill up. Schedules change. Vacations are over. Everyone starts talking about getting “back into a routine.” Almost like the mid-year New Year's Resolution.
And before we’re even overwhelmed, we start preparing ourselves to be overwhelmed.
Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s September. It just knows there’s suddenly more demand and less recovery.
More commitments. More decisions. More people needing shit from you.
So you brace. And THAT is a pattern I know extremely well.
· · ·
Why am I so familiar with that pattern? Well... I spent years having almost no control over my time.
As a firefighter paramedic, the tones dropped and you went.
Eating? Too bad. Sleeping? Not anymore.
Whatever you were doing stopped because something else immediately became more important. I literally had no idea when holidays were until the random Monday morning with zero traffic (which is absolutely unusual for Massachusetts. IYKYK).
And then I left that career... and somehow recreated the same thing myself.
No tones. No chief. Nobody forcing me. I was dropping my own damn tones. Conditioned myself to fill my own schedule to the brim. Because if I didn't, I'd feel guilty. Can you relate?
Another meeting. Another project. Another thing I could squeeze into the calendar. And always the same promise: I’ll slow down when things settle down.
Except they don’t.
September becomes October. October becomes the holidays. Then January comes and apparently we need to reinvent our entire existence.
Then spring gets busy. And before we know it, we’re saying:
“I’ll slow down this summer.”
We’ve basically created an annual subscription to postponing our own lives, until the grand finale of *retirement* — (which I have a few things in the works about not waiting until retirement to enjoy your life... but for now, I'll leave it as a teaser...).
Which brings me to this week’s practice.
· · ·
This Week’s Practice: Keep One Thing
Think back over your summer and ask yourself:
What did I give myself permission to do this summer that I don’t actually have to stop doing?
Maybe you drank your coffee outside. Took a walk without a podcast. Saw your friends more. Left work on time. Had weekends with absolutely nothing planned. Read a shitty romance novel that contributed nothing whatsoever to your personal development.
Whatever yours was, pick one.
Not five or an entirely new fall routine. Just one thing you did because you just... enjoyed it.
And keep doing it. Because the point isn’t really the coffee, the walk, the book, or the empty Saturday.
It’s noticing how quickly we take away our own permission when life gets busy again.
And please, for the love of God, don’t turn this into another wellness routine you have to successfully complete.
Summer didn’t give you permission to enjoy your life.
You did. The name "September" on a made up calendar doesn’t get to take it back.
· · ·
🎧 This Week on the Hustle Rebels Podcast
🎙️ In Case You Missed It...Last week, I sat down with Roberta Ravella to talk about what happens when you realize some of the rules you’ve been following around work, success, and life might not actually be yours.
We talked about questioning the rules we’ve inherited, figuring out what actually works for you, and what happens when you stop automatically doing things just because that’s how you’ve always done them.
Which feels pretty damn appropriate for this week’s conversation.
If you haven’t listened yet, go find Hustle Rebels wherever you listen to podcasts.
And don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, or come tell me what you thought. I’m a nosey neighbor. I want to know what’s going on in your life too.
Watch on YouTube:
Listen Here: [Why Success Still Feels Empty: Women, Burnout and Self-Worth with Roberta Ravella]
· · ·
So as September comes in swinging with school schedules, work schedules, activities, obligations, and apparently neighborhood photo shoots I was not briefed on...
Pay attention to what you’re automatically giving up. You don’t need to preserve some perfect version of summer. Just don’t hand every good part of it back because the calendar changed.
P.S. If you read this and thought, “I genuinely don’t know what I’d pick,” pay attention to that.
If you’ve spent so much time being productive, useful, responsible, or needed that you’re not even sure what you enjoy anymore, that’s exactly the kind of shit we’re pulling apart inside Burn the Blueprint.
The first week of the Identity Reset is free → [Burn the Blueprint WEEK ONE FREE]
P.P.S. And if you’re ready to go deeper than doing it on your own, that’s what my one-on-one work is for. Reply and tell me what’s going on. I read them. Or book a call for a chat → [Free connection call]
- Renae
Wayward Wellness Coaching
Hustle Rebels Podcast
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