The Pressure to Have "The Best Summer Ever"

A few weeks ago, a client said something to me that I haven't stopped thinking about.

"I feel guilty for not enjoying this more."

She wasn't describing a hard summer. Quite the opposite — good weather, good company, the sea a five-minute walk away. By every outside measure, she was living the thing people save all year for. And still, some days, she felt flat. Tired. Not particularly happy. And on top of that ordinary, unremarkable dip, she felt something else: the belief that she wasn't allowed to feel it. That feeling anything less than joyful, here, now, in July, meant something was wrong with her.

I want to say clearly what I said to her: nothing is wrong with you. But something is wrong with the pressure.

Making room for an ordinary day, even in July

Every other month of the year, we're allowed a full range of feelings. A flat Tuesday in March doesn't need explaining to anyone. Summer is different — especially summer here, in a place that lives in most people's imagination as pure escape. There's a quiet, well-meaning expectation that comes with it: that you'll be happy, easily and often, because look where you get to be. And when a day doesn't quite match that, it's easy to wonder if you're the one getting it wrong, rather than simply having an ordinary day in an extraordinary place.

There's a name for part of what's happening here — some people call it toxic positivity — though I want to hold that phrase loosely, because it can sound like an accusation, and nobody is doing anything wrong by wanting to feel good. What it actually points to is simpler and kinder: somewhere along the way, many of us learned that only the pleasant feelings were welcome out loud. That gratitude, ease, and joy could be spoken freely, while tiredness, flatness, and disappointment were better kept quiet — especially in a season that's supposed to be effortless. Summer just turns the volume up on a lesson most of us learned a long time ago.

And feelings, gently put, don't really work that way. They don't arrive on command just because the setting is beautiful. When there's no room for the quieter ones, they don't disappear — they just wait, a little heavier, underneath the ones we're allowed to show.

Living where other people holiday

If you live in Ibiza year-round, summer asks something different of you than it asks of the people visiting.

For them, this is a pause — a stepping outside of ordinary life for a week or two. For you, it's often closer to the opposite: the fullest, busiest stretch of the year. The days get longer, the island gets louder, and work rarely slows down the way it does for everyone passing through. All of that is unfolding in exactly the setting most people associate with rest.

That contrast can make it harder to notice your own tiredness. When everyone around you is visibly, deliberately unwinding, it's easy to assume your own feelings should fall in line with theirs, simply because you happen to live somewhere they're on holiday. But living inside a place doesn't automatically hand you its holiday rhythm. You're still going about your actual life here — just in the season when that life happens to get fuller, not lighter.

What I hear most in my practice this time of year isn't complaint. It's something closer to a quiet tiredness sitting right alongside real love for this place — the two existing together, at the same time, in the same person. That's not a contradiction. It's just what a full season can look like from the inside.

You are allowed to live somewhere beautiful and still find a season demanding. The two were never in conflict.

Why "just be grateful" doesn't work

Gratitude is often offered as the antidote here — notice something good, and the harder feeling is supposed to soften. And it can, genuinely. I believe in a gratitude practice. I use one myself, and I practise it with my children. But I think we sometimes reach for it too quickly, before a feeling has had the chance to say what it actually needs to say. Maybe that's not about gratitude being wrong at all. Maybe it's simply something many of us were never taught: how to let a feeling speak, sit with it for a moment, and be genuinely okay with it being there — without rushing to fix it or trade it in for something more comfortable.

With my own kids, alongside naming something we're grateful for, we also name something that wasn't good about the day. Not to dwell on it, but because both are usually true of most days, and I want them to grow up knowing that. Life isn't good all the time, and that's not a flaw in us to correct — it's simply part of what being alive involves. Some days genuinely carry more shadow than light. That's allowed too, and it doesn't cancel out the gratitude sitting right alongside it.

What actually helps

The first thing that helps is permission — the simple, underrated act of allowing a feeling to be what it is without immediately managing it. Tired is allowed. Flat is allowed. Overwhelmed by a season that looks, from the outside, like paradise is allowed. You don't need to justify it to anyone, including yourself.

The second is noticing the gap between what you're presenting and what you're actually experiencing, and asking what it would take to close that gap even slightly — not by performing less joy, but by finding one or two people you can be honest with about how the summer actually feels.

And the third, which is slower and deeper, is looking at where the belief came from in the first place — the idea that your worth depends on being visibly, continuously fine. For many of the women I work with, that belief didn't start with summer or with social media. It started much earlier, in families or environments where difficult feelings weren't welcome, and where being easy and upbeat was the price of belonging. Summer just turns up the volume on a pattern that was already there.

A gentle invitation

If you've been quietly performing a summer you're not actually having — if the gap between the photos and how you feel has started to feel exhausting to maintain — you don't have to keep it up here.

You are allowed to be somewhere beautiful and still be finding things hard. You are allowed to want the season to be different than it is. None of that makes you ungrateful. It makes you honest.

If you'd like a space to be honest about it, I'm here.