Our 'Hot Girl Summer' Is a Sweaty Mess, but at Least We Can Enjoy the Memes

May was a time of hope: Megan Thee Stallion had just dropped "Fever," introducing us to the concept of "real hot girl shit" and kicking off what we all collectively decided would be a hot girl summer. That lasted a good while—shitty boyfriends got dumped, crop tops were purchased with abandon, Instagram overflowed with shameless selfies—but as the season has dragged on, temperatures have grown increasingly unbearable, and all our innocent, ambitious dreams have gone unrealized, things are looking a bit different. We all want to have a hot girl summer—but for many of us, it's just not happening. Our new clothes fit weird. We're covered in mosquito bites. We have terrible sunburns. We're very, very sweaty.

Incapable of sustaining the whole "hot girl"/"hot boy" thing, we're dealing with the vast gulf between our aspirations and our grim reality the best way we know how: by making a bunch of dumb memes about it.

If you've spent every day of the last few months drenched in sweat, leaving embarrassing stains on your clothes and making sleep impossible, guess what: You're not alone.

Many of us imagined—

believed

, with every fiber of our beings—that our hot girl summer would look something like this:

When, in reality, it's looking more like this:

I have no idea how to classify this one:

We're trying to have a hot girl summer—we really are. But this shit is hard.

It's difficult to admit, but maybe it's time to give up on hot girl summer once and for all. Maybe it's time to lean into the fact that we're just not cutting it—not this year, at least—and start being honest about what's really going on during this hellacious mess of a season.

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