The Summer Refresh

Lily Pinto (she/her)

Editorial Team Member

As the summer came to a close, I decided that it was time for me to finally deep clean my room, to completely start fresh with a room that looked practically brand new. Maybe it’s the idea that the school year can bring a fresh start. Maybe it’s knowing that soon my mornings will be me frantically grabbing all my stuff and running out the door, or that my room will become the place where I drop everything after a long day. Whatever the reason, I decided that deep cleaning my room was important, so I did.  

At first, I just started cleaning the usual stuff: hanging up clothes folded on my shelf organizer and cleaning up my vanity/dresser. After that, it was finally time to go through my things: I went through all of the clothes in my closet, donating anything that I didn’t use from the year prior, going through my shelves in my room, filled to the brim with papers and folders that I had used throughout high school. By going through all of these things, I noticed that my room was messier than it initially appeared.

I think that our brains can work the same way. As students, we are constantly moving from one thing to another. If a test doesn’t go the way we want? We move on because there’s another assignment due tomorrow, or another test in an AP class at the end of the week. We get used to having to move on and not fully process it; we say, “I’ll deal with it later," but somehow later just becomes further and further down the line. By doing this, we become really good at putting things away without actually dealing with them. It’s kind of like shoving everything into a drawer before someone comes over. From the outside, it looks clean, but it’s a temporary fix. The minute you open that drawer, you’re suddenly reminded of everything you just hid away because it was the “easy” solution.

Eventually though, you have to clean it. And the weird part is that cleaning doesn’t always make it look better right away. For the first couple of hours, my room looked like a disaster. Everything I had hidden away was suddenly out in the open. But that was when the actual cleaning began. It was progress. You might realize you’re more stressed than you thought. You might finally acknowledge that something has been bothering you. You might feel overwhelmed by how much you were actually carrying. That isn't a sign that you've made things worse; it's a sign that you're finally allowing yourself to process what was already there.

Maybe that’s what a reset is actually supposed to be. Not magically having everything figured out by the first day, but giving yourself permission to notice everything that you’ve been avoiding and start sorting through it. Obviously this doesn’t have to be a one-day process. It just has to be one thought at a time.

By the time I was done cleaning my room, it wasn’t perfect, but it did feel a lot lighter. Maybe our minds deserve the same kind of summer refresh that my room needed. Before another school year starts or progresses, maybe we should take a second to look at what we’ve been pushing aside. The stress, the expectations, the disappointment, the things we're scared to admit, and even the things we're proud of but haven't stopped to appreciate. Because starting fresh doesn’t mean pretending the mess never existed. Sometimes, starting fresh means finally cleaning it up.