It's Summer!

And a Very Happy Zohran Mamdani to you.

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This one’s free. Brought to you by vibes.

Buds. A good thing! Finally a good thing! You have no idea how this feels. It’s the deep asscrack of summer, there’s been a heat wave, every fire hydrant has been busted open, and it feels tremendous to want things and get them.

Also, high-key, it’s wonderful to have an elected official in our sights who isn’t a vampiric daemon or an irredeemable herb but it also feels especially fitting that finally—FINALLY—New York gets to have hot, swaggy leadership. Like truly, why else live here? It’s been so bad for morale, having these other jabronis. It’s been like having our airports for mayor.

Plus, it’s the part of the summer where all the aggressively rich people have decamped for the Hamptons and that always feels wonderful. It’s just all the around-the-way, regular-degular neighborhood folk, everybody equalized by swamp-ass and slow-walking and the kind of turgid, thought-obliterating heat that feels like too much indica or having the kind of Thursday where you start watching movies for no reason at 8AM other than to manage expectations for what your brain is capable of that day and because: air conditioning.

But it’s also hard. Summer in New York is a lot. I always find it particularly difficult to properly dissociate which is my favorite version of a sober high. I truly believe that dissociation is a transformative act of non-violence, a self-propelled mini-vacation but in summer, it’s like my brain and attention span could do it but woof, the body, that stinking meat ship, it’s harder to distance from when it’s a thousand degrees and each molecule is chafing against the next like spicy inner thigh on spicy inner thigh.

I don’t know about you but every summer, I forget what I wore the summer before. It’s like Men In Black light every time. My husband wears the same thing with minor variations for circumstance but he basically wears the same general shapes all year. He has a modular wardrobe, all black, that reminds me of Smurfette’s closet, but, again, all black, and he has three or four or nine of the same pair of pants, shorts, sweater or shirt. Several kept on ice.

Crucially though he is extremely skinny and I think this factors into it. It is like living with a lizard the way he can just ease into the torpor. I think he just blinks slower and that somehow regulates all his processes.

Me, I overheat. I get anxious. I start panicking, checking all the dials and levers, getting a little manic, convinced something’s gone terribly awry because I am slightly thirsty or sweating or sleepy. Clothing and general physical discomfort factors into it. This crawling, ever-present, suspicious wrong feeling of my body.

Since finding out that I was autistic and have hyper sensitive sensory issues, it all makes sense. And blessedly since getting support for disordered eating, I no longer get hijacked by the booming, relentless thought flashing in six trillion point font in my head that what’s wrong is that I am the wrong size. The dysmorphia gets loud in the summer. Of course it does. It’s such an easy culprit. And letting it just pull up a chair helps.

This part of me is exhausted, it’s been screaming the same warning system at me for four decades. This part of me needs to drink water and have some electrolytes. Maybe some L-theanine. Whatever, basically by now I can expect that I will feel like I look fucked up when I look pretty much how I always look to anyone else. Especially if that person is also hot and feeling fucked up about their sweat mustache or hair or how there is an alarming volume of water pouring off their faces or how their K beauty sunblock has melted into their eye and is surprisingly painful despite not leaving a white cast.

I’m probably never going to solve my summer wardrobe. I know in my heart that my situation would be instantly improved if I just made, like four outfits and got rid of everything else but also I would so much rather go lie down.

OK, now this seems like a good place for the easy, breezy, summer dressing tip that I repeat every year and love:

How to get a swimsuit body?

Put a swimsuit on a body.

It’s all going to be great.

When I wrote that article for New York Magazine about discovering that I was autistic, I wrote about how illuminating (like shockingly) it was to just write down things that I liked and didn’t like. And accepting that I wouldn’t remember unless I could see it somewhere right in front of me.

Put on the spot, my mind goes blank when pressed to make a choice based on my own preferences. This tendency could be an ADHD thing: the issues with working memory and prioritization. Or it might come with the territory of mimicking the likes and dislikes of those around me.

I bought a big whiteboard and wrote down my dislikes. This took longer than you’d think. Over the next few months, data was gathered in the field. One night, I might bite into a shrimp, shrimp that sounded terrific on the menu, and then go home and add SHRIMP to the list. Another day, a friend might gift me a scented candle, and not until I put it in the drawer filled with other unused scented candles I’d been given did I add SCENTED CANDLES. Without the list, I won’t remember.

Right now I’m doing the same thing with my aspirational summer self when it comes to dressing and having a summer body and here’s where I’ve arrived as generally helpful and within the scope of my ambitions and capabilities.

Again, this might seem extremely obvious. I don’t know your life.

• No flex zone. This isn’t a time for getting fits off. At least for me. No new trends. Enough that I will make a ten-year-old Rae Sreemurd reference.

  Dresses are great because it’s one and done. I can’t get into anything fancy. Especially if it requires specifically shaped or colored undergarments. FOH.

• Investment pieces are not it. Fall is great. Winter? Wonderful. But when it comes to summer, there’s too much sebaciousness. Too many condiments. I want to eat stone fruit to the face without forethought. I won’t wear something fancy. It will freak me out. I’ll preemptively feel bad about getting grime or sauce on it. Or feel mincing and squirly. All of this will subconsciously factor into a general reluctance to wear the thing and then after a few years, having not worn the thing, I will figure that I hate it when truly I love it but am afraid of it.

• Rainbow or death. I’m all about the cheap shit in the summer and I’m embarrassed by this but not enough for it not to be true. Old Navy, Rainbow, Aerie, Target, shit I got from Santee Alley in LA a decade ago, and those little boutiques between Soho and Chinatown that stock half flammable athleisure and half flammable thotty club-gear, these are the stores I have always done my best summer shopping in. Also, Korean markets where you buy voluminous, elastic waisted pants in three different colors. It’s weird but there’s something about summer and it seeming like everyone else is fucking around in The Row mesh flats with zero arch support and sheer vintage Prada skirts worn so low I have genuine anatomical confusion or insouciant little Magda Butrym drapey bits of deliciousness or Kallmeyer jorts that make me feel really self-conscious but I need to accept this. I also can’t wear summer cashmere. This will never be a thing for me.

• Don’t feel bullied into getting rid of the cheap shit. I mean, no one is doing the bullying. The bully is me. But the biggest mistake I made two apartment moves ago was feeling like I could do better. That I had to force myself to get over the cheap shit. Like this rayon Forever 21 A-line floral dress, a handful of unbranded tops, and this pleated skirt from Primark that I bought like fifteen years ago. They all just fit well, which is to say I usually forgot I was wearing them, but I got it into compare and despair and figured I needed to trade up and grow up and I regret it every summer.

• It begins and ends with cut and hand. Notice I didn’t say fit necessarily. Again, this might be a sensory thing but hand, as in what the fabric feels like, is crucial for me. This means bubble gauze, rayon, cotton, textiles that I wish were more popular in more sophisticated, interesting cuts. I wish I liked linen because then I could just keep it etsy’d or third-hand Eileen Fisher’d but I don’t. By the end of the day I feel like I’m wearing chainmail woven from celery. I don’t mind the wrinkles, I just can’t get behind how bloated and scratchy it feels on my neck and back. Seersucker too can make me want to end my life.

• Two a days. The sweetest thing I do for myself is have two showers a day in the summer. One after my workout or OutsideUnitTM and another right before I put on my pajamas and go to bed. The key is that it’s also after I brush my teeth and slot in my mouth guard. I have so much anxiety going to bed generally but in the summer, it’s worse. It’s reminiscent of being a little kid in the summer where you have FOMO about being asleep and the sun feeling emotionally loud even when it’s dark outside. What I tend to do is start roving around my kitchen and gobbling little bits of food and sometimes this food is super not helpful, total nightmare food, like leftovers eaten cold out of the fridge that I don’t even want or those Trader Joe’s Takis or, like, dairy for no reason. For my nighttime shower, I take what we in our house call a “crouch shower.” It’s a shower in the tub but sitting and it began after our first trip to Japan when I realized that showering while seated, holding the shower head in my hand and just passing the water over my skin, does something to my brain. It closes all the tabs at once and I feel immediately reduced to a pure and essential part of me that I can witness myself giving care to and it’s a marvel since I am usually so impatient with this part. Sometimes I’m deeply moved by my own parenting capabilities as the steward of my body. Someone in some 12-step room once told me that a bath reminds them of safety. That their body understands that removing all their clothes and being submerged in water is the signal to shut off their hyper vigilance and I follow this logic completely. Except it’s summer and I am far too impatient to run an entire bath and sit in it.

• Ninja Creami is life. OK, I’m not likely to ever have affiliate links or links period telling you to buy shit. That’s not what this corner of the internet is about for me. Unless it’s my book, of which I will be linking the ever-loving shit. However, getting a TikTok ice cream machine has changed my life. I’m not linking it, if you really want one you have to google it and maybe that will stop you from Pervert’s Harvesting if it’s not a good time for you to buy more Plastic Landfill Crap, but wow. I love my Ninja Creami. I love soft serve and this is not soft serve but if you let everything melt a little the texture just about gets there [Edit: I know there is a soft serve version but I just can’t]. Every morning, I’m not even kidding, every morning of every day in the summer, I toss in half a banana and a cup of yogurt into the little tub and after dinner throw in some almond milk and then run the machine and eat frozen yogurt. I would have a regular ice cream machine if my audio sensitivity wasn’t so bad. Even the Creami is too loud. I have to start running it and bolt into the next room and shut the door. It’s like how my partner can’t run a vacuum cleaner while I’m in the house. I have to leave. I am a very chill and fun person to live with. But while a regular ice cream machine takes liquid and freezes it, churning to form little ice crystals, with the Creami you freeze the tub-shaped brick and the Creami grinds it down. It’s more a shaved ice situation than a traditional ice cream machine so the grind-time is significantly shorter. It also requires way less clean up and prep. Some Creami enthusiasts are big into adding a little sugar-free jello pudding powder into it so it’ll thicken but I keep it simple. My ice sludge doesn’t have to be photogenic. It is private and it is mine.

It doesn’t matter how everybody else does summer, I need to remember what this season means for me. Again, none of this is particularly revolutionary. And if it sounds like I treat myself like a child, you’re absolutely right. Summer is when my inner littles get really rambunctious and very irascible and while it would be great if I didn’t have a ton of childhood trauma and neglect to sort through, that’s not what this is.

Extra helpfully, I will probably need to read this again in a few short weeks to remember. And definitely again next year.