June 21st 2026 is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Yesterday, as I prepared to celebrate the solstice, sunset arrived just after 8:30PM, though the sky was reluctant to surrender to night. Even as darkness approached, a pale wash of apricot lingered overhead. Summer is here.
I have mixed feelings about this day.
Part of me delights in the extravagance of the summer solstice. There is time for one more walk at Ocean Beach, one more conversation with a friend, time to write one more paragraph, one more page of a book can be read as dusk lingers. The world itself seems to exhale, inviting us to idle a little longer with whatever task is at hand.
But another part of me recognizes the familiar challenge that accompanies these extended days. My sleep deficits begin to creep in. I awaken too early, then get cranky because I haven’t had enough rest. So I lean into coffee and tea, then have trouble falling to sleep. Rinse and repeat for the next month or so until I pull back from caffeinating myself, or the morning grow just a bit darker.
Many neurodivergent conditions appear to be intertwined with circadian rhythms. Researchers have observed links between ADHD and delayed sleep phases. Autistic individuals report higher rates of sleep disturbances. Migraine brains are famously sensitive to disruptions in routine and sleep. Tourette syndrome symptoms often worsen with fatigue.
The more I learn, the more I am certain that neurodiversity is not simply diversity of thought. Perhaps it is also diversity of body clocks. Some brains greet the dawn with enthusiasm. Others come alive at midnight. Some require rigid regularity while others resist it entirely. And some of us seem perpetually a little (or a lot) out of phase with the larger world.
I have lived with a wonky brain clock my entire life. Yesterday, I surrendered to it.
I spent the afternoon making flower crowns for a dinner party in the Berkeley Hills. I made four altogether: one for me, one for my partner, and one each for our hosts. It was a joy to work with living materials that smell like wet earth and meadows. Fresh roses and chrysanthemums shared space on my dining table/workspace with succulents clipped from my garden. I tucked in purple statice, and strawflowers in shades of pink, orange, and yellow.
There is something deeply regulating about making beautiful things with one’s hands. As I worked, the hours quietly dissolved. ADHD has given me a few gifts, but a reliable sense of elapsed time is not among them. Time blindness is a phenomenon familiar to many people with ADHD. Hours can vanish while one is engaged in meaningful work, while ten minutes spent waiting in line can feel interminable. As expected, my meticulous attention to the details of the flower crowns meant we arrived fifteen minutes late for the dinner party.
We sat on the deck of our friends’ home adorned with our floral circlets and gazed across the bay. From our vantage point we watched the sun settle behind the silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge and the dark outline of Mount Tamalpais. The light softened by degrees as wisps of fog drifted in from the Pacific.
After the first course, we took a short walk to a nearby waterfall along Keith Avenue, named for the turn-of-the-century Berkeley landscape painter William Keith. Water from Keith Falls descends four levels across volcanic rock before disappearing beneath a culvert and continuing its hidden journey downstream. By then we had entered the gloaming, that lovely old word for the softening of daylight into evening. The waterfall felt like it occupied a threshold between worlds; the last traces of daylight still filtered through the trees, but night had already begun its quiet arrival. Somewhere above us, a Steller’s jay announced its presence with characteristic insistence, while owls called to one another from deeper within the trees. For a moment, the world felt exquisitely calibrated.
“Calibrated” feels like an odd thing for a neurodivergent person to say. So much of our lives are spent trying to synchronize ourselves with whatever our culture or family or community calls “normal”. We are often told that our difficulties stem from poor discipline, poor planning, or insufficient effort. But increasingly, I wonder if some of us simply inhabit time differently.
The brain is not separate from the body. It does not think independently of our hormones, our sleep architecture, or the changing light of the seasons. The brain keeps time. And some of us are more sensitive to that timekeeping than others.
At this time of year, more daylight means more input. More invitations. More opportunities to remain awake. More chances to say yes when perhaps our bodies are quietly asking for rest. That extra light creates a sort of psychosocial asymmetry.
The summer solstice is nature’s annual celebration of asymmetry. It is not balance that we are witnessing, but excess. The longest day of the year is an extravagance. Nature does not apologize for this imbalance. Perhaps I should extend myself the same grace.
