it's summertime and love is everywhere
overachiever girl from california has thoughts during a heat wave; gets sappy and reminiscent
We’re headed in a new direction
We rearranged the same intersection
Until we found a new way
— “Sonic”, Olivia Barton
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with summer.
I hate hot weather. I was born and raised in the Bay Area, California, but I only lived in the cold, foggy San Francisco area—my perfect weather—until I was about three. We moved out to a suburb after my little brother was born, where the weather is as indecisive as a moth in a lamp store. It’s never been very consistent. For one, at some point, it was pouring rain here a little over a month ago, but immediately afterward, the next week welcomed a hint of an all-too-familiar dry heat; the kind that has undoubtedly now arrived in full swing. There’s a massive heat wave all over right now, but where I am, the temperature has reached over 107 degrees several times this week alone. (I’m not loving it.)
My parents always joke that I should live in Alaska or Antarctica with the penguins, and that it’s highly ironic that I’m Filipino and have such a strong aversion to heat, with the Philippines being extremely hot and humid. Withstanding the heat should be in your blood, my mom always says. But then again, she hates the heat, too. She just complains way less than me, if at all. Meanwhile, I always find a way to verbalize my grievances regarding the heat where I live, especially when I was in middle school and high school, because California was experiencing the peak of its drought during those years, and when it gets hot here, it also gets incredibly dry.
Growing up, I would look forward to the end of the school year and the beginning of summer vacation, mainly because of what the term ‘vacation’ implied: a break. A break from physically having to be at school everyday; from annoying, mean kids at school; from having to keep up my image as the picture-perfect student who never complained about anything. That last part was what I looked forward to most—finally being able to let myself relax. Having to be that version of myself in front of my teachers and classmates took a toll on me, causing me to hold frustrations in until I got picked up from school, and inadvertently causing bursts of attitude at home, which rightfully earned me lectures from my parents.
They’ve have always emphasized to my siblings and I the importance of good education, so I’ve always been oriented towards academics. But, it often gave me stress to the point of burnout whenever I approached the end of a school year or a semester, because I’m a perfectionist and afraid of disappointing my teachers, my parents, and myself.
I never truly vegged out during summers, though, because despite school being out, my mom was (and still is) a firm believer in keeping me and my siblings’ young, developing brains stimulated, and had us do Brain Quest workbooks that were a couple grades ahead of the grade we would be going into in the fall. That didn’t really bother me though, or make me feel robbed of a summer vacation, because I did genuinely enjoy learning—and plus, filling out workbooks was honestly super fun. Nothing compared to the feeling of opening an advanced workbook and recognizing the concepts being discussed. I thrived off of completing a section, handing it over to my mom to grade, and looming over her shoulder with anticipation as she scrawled a “100%!” at the top of the page with a huge smiley face right next to it. It made me feel like a little genius.
I recently learned that the reason my mom had my siblings and I do that during so-called summer vacations is because her mom, my grandma, had her do the very same thing. And my mom agrees with me—it was very satisfying to feel smart, to have our intelligence validated, and to make the conscious choice to keep our brains working during a season where it wasn’t expected of you to do so.
Ever since I was able to start taking college classes at fifteen, we kicked it up a notch above Brain Quest and all throughout undergrad, I hadn’t gone a single year without taking at least one class during the summer semester.
The summer of 2022 was my first summer, probably ever, without doing some sort of workbook or taking a summer college class. But even then, I still enrolled in a twelve-week-long online course at Harvard in Hellenic studies (specifically centered around Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the concept of the Ancient Greek hero), and spent a good deal of time preparing myself for my first semester of grad school that fall. It was that summer that I realized: maybe my academic achievements aren’t only rooted in drive and ambition, but stem also from a deep fear of being still.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how deep this pattern ran. Every summer, every break, every moment of potential stillness was filled with some form of academic pursuit. It was as if I were allergic to idleness, always needing to prove something—to myself, to others, to some invisible judge keeping score of my achievements.
But why? Was it actually a sense of ambition driving me, or was there something else lurking beneath the surface? The idea that I might be running from something—maybe the fear of not being enough, or the dread of facing my own thoughts in quiet moments—started to take root. It was uncomfortable to consider, but also oddly liberating. It got me thinking about other parts of my life where I might be chasing validation or running from my own fears: how much of what I do is genuinely for my own growth and happiness? And how much is just a well-disguised attempt to prove my worth?
These questions led me down a rabbit hole of self-reflection, making me reconsider not just my academic choices, but my approach to relationships, success, and self-worth in general. And that’s when I remembered this quote that hit me hard back in my teens. It seemed to connect to all these swirling thoughts in a way I couldn’t quite articulate yet, but still felt important.
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
That’s a quote from Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower that I think about literally all the time. It’s probably one of the most formative novels I read during my adolescence, and a loaded statement at that. When I read that sentence for the first time at about fifteen-years-old, I was a little confused because I hadn’t experienced being in love yet.
I used to think that “accepting the love I thought I deserved” meant that the existence of romantic love in my life was a direct correlation to what I believed myself to be worthy of receiving. In other words: if boys don’t even like me to begin with, that automatically means I’m not in a relationship, that automatically means no one currently “loves” me, and that automatically means that I probably think I deserve nothing anyway, which is why I have nothing.
It’s a very juvenile mode of thinking, but that’s being a fifteen-year-old girl for you. Everything and nothing is happening to you simultaneously, and at all times. One minute the world is ending, and the next it’s as if a million different doors have suddenly opened themselves up to you. No one loves you and everyone is also obsessed with you, and you feel numb and overstimulated at the exact same time. Everything makes sense but it also doesn’t. You know everything, but you also know absolutely nothing, and that makes you upset.
I know now that accepting the love I think I deserve means exactly what it sounds like. I believe I deserve good, genuine love, and I believe it exists—so that is what I will strive to accept into my life. The wonderful thing about this is that it’s not just a romantic thing: at fifteen, I hadn’t considered that love can appear in more forms than romantic—that it can take on the form of a good friend; a kind stranger; my mother and father. At fifteen, love was almost solely a romantic notion to me. But I’m twenty-three now, and my idea of love and its forms has changed drastically. In fact, my ideas of a lot of things have changed drastically, and that occurrence in and of itself is something to both celebrate and to grieve.
Over the seven months of this year so far, more than ever, I’ve been acutely aware of the prevalence of love and the many, many forms it takes on in my life. I used to feel so unfulfilled by my life because of the lack of a romantic presence; I’d feel left out of conversations and experiences because I’d never had a serious romantic relationship. And even when I did go out of my way to make that happen for myself, I still felt somewhat disconnected from the experience everyone else seemed to be relaying. My experience and how I felt in my relationship felt incongruous to the true love everyone had been raving about. The second I realized the reason why, I removed myself from that situation and instantly felt the contrast of being in it versus not. I instantly knew that it was not love, at least, not in its purest form.
Real love wouldn’t have done that to me. Real love wouldn’t do that to me. Real love would have found a way to prevent it from even happening in the first place. I believe that I deserve the kind of love that fills the spaces between words in late-night conversations with my best friends, or the comforting silence shared between my siblings and I who know what the other is thinking without having to say a single word. The kind of love that exists within the giggles that arise from inside jokes that have stood the test of time. This love is the constant, steady presence that grounds me when romance falls through or feels bleak. It’s a love that doesn’t demand or expect, but just exists.
I’ve been trying to figure out what love and success truly mean—beyond the textbooks and novels I’ve stuck my nose into, and one thing I’ve learned for sure is that love isn’t just about grand gestures or dramatic declarations. It’s in the little things. It’s in the references that make zero sense to everyone except you and that one person. Late-night talks with your friends that somehow fix the world (at least until morning). Playful exchanges of flirtation that leave you screaming into pillows and grinning like an idiot. Those moments of lighthearted conversation that make everything a little brighter. Those are all forms of love too, even if it’s not the big, serious kind I used to believe it to be. At least, it is in my mind.
The shift in perspective that I’ve felt over my twenties so far has been pretty liberating, to say the least. I’m learning that I don’t need to be a human doing all the time; sometimes it's okay to just be a human being. My worth isn't measured by how many accolades I can rack up or how productive my breaks are. It’s in the genuine connections I make, the laughter I share, and the person I’m becoming.
At my core, I’m still the Faith I’ve always been: of course I still love learning and pushing myself. But I’ve also learned the importance of and value in stillness too, and in those seemingly insignificant moments of connection. Living is not about filling every moment with activity or chasing the next achievement. Sometimes, it’s about appreciating the love that’s already there—the kind that doesn’t come with conditions or expectations, but shows up in a silly text from a friend or a shared laugh over literally nothing.
I’ve been trying to remind myself that one of the most beautiful things about life is its unpredictability, the chaos, and the people I meet that leave me forgetting what my life was like before they arrived. I think that maybe the real magic lies in slowing down. After all, is it really worth spending your summers spreading yourself thin if it means missing out on the love that's hiding in plain sight?
WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PIECE, FAITH!!! I see so much of myself reflected in this post, and it really made my heart ache for you because of it, but also made me feel so warm at the same time. I know I’ll be coming back to read this again and again for this feeling :’)
This is how I aspire to write. Thank you for this 🙏🏼