September is a month that can’t quite decide what it wants to be. The air still clings with summer’s humidity, but the shadows are stretching longer, and the evenings whisper of autumn. It feels like a threshold month—a doorway I linger at, reluctant to step through.
I’ve been mourning summer, even though I hardly went out in it. No picnics at the river, no hikes, not even a lazy afternoon in the woods. Another season gone, and I feel like I missed it. Maybe that’s why September feels heavy this year.
Loss has found me in other ways, too. My aunt passed away over the weekend, another thread cut in the fabric of family. Fewer and fewer of the people I grew up knowing remain. Each time, I’m reminded that my own seasons are slipping past as well. I’m no longer afraid of dying, but I am afraid of losing the ability to do the things I love—the writing, the drawing, the simple joys of living that make life worth the effort.
And yet this melancholy has its own strange fuel. The shorter days make me want to open Scrivener, dive back into novel edits, and focus more fully on learning my crafts. There’s comfort in retreating to words and images, disappearing into the quiet work that has always felt like home.
I’ve been looking back over the last six months, asking whether this creative ecosystem I’ve built is working. What I’ve discovered is that it is—and I’m grateful for it. But I’ve also stumbled on something I wish I’d known sooner: the way to stay happy isn’t in grand resolutions, but in the small, regular adjustments we make. Pausing long enough to say, “This part is working, keep it up,” or “This little thing is wearing you down, change it.” We are, all the time, creating our lives one decision at a time out of infinite possibilities.
And maybe that’s the gift tucked inside September’s melancholy. Time feels like it’s flying because I am, at last, enjoying the flight. If it dragged, it would mean I was wishing it away.
September reminds me of that, just as it reminds me of being ten years old, staring at the clock in school, waiting for three o’clock. Waiting to walk home in the warm sun, to kick up the leaves on the sidewalk, to get on with life and do what I wanted.
The leaves are stirring again. Another season is passing, and another one is calling me forward.
