Light! Sun! Open skies after storms!

Written May 08 2026

I think this was the best day of my recent life.

I feel great. I made my way through the grocery store earlier bouncing around like a maniac because my legs would not allow me to stay still or walk in a straight line. I made biscuits and talked to one of my roommates, who asked me to water her plants for her while she is gone for a week, and I happily did it right after she was out of the door. Before that, I was at university in a seminar on lesbian poetry and we just chatted about something or other in our group after we were done with our assignment. I talked to a friend in the hall right after, took a stroll outside, scanned a book, gazed at the clouds outside the library window—yet I walk like someone that just got proposed to or found out they won the lottery.

Maybe, in a way, I did. I feel like I’m standing in the rain, face upturned, after a yearslong drought. These past two months have probably been the hardest in my entire life. I have had days I spent entirely in bed save for a single bathroom break. I have walked around outside with a mask on so nobody could see my face, walking so slowly I might as well have been standing still; I could not will my legs to go any faster. I had lain in bed one night and as the sun slowly drained out of the corners of my room, it felt as if it took my whole entire soul with it, leaving only my body behind. I feared that I would wake up the next day without ever waking up, just a walking-talking body living my life until it, too, would give up, but without any me behind its lifeless dull eyes. I woke up and I was still there and I had felt as if I had just avoided a terrible fate. I opened the blinds and the sky was still gray and I felt as if it would never lighten again.

And yet, it did. My life did actually improve, markedly so. I started dressing more comfortably, taking care of my appearance a bit more, started exercising, tried to be more outgoing and taking an interest in my own life and not going out of my way to avoid living my own life instead of floating down the river of time till the big waterfall should get me. I am not a spiritual person or in the least bit superstitious and trite platitudes of the kitchen-calendar-inspirational-quote-kind mostly bore me or turn me off, but I cannot help but feel that life does give back to you tenfold what you put into it. Depression can feel like a veil that distorts your vision of the world, twisting everything around like a funhouse mirror until friendly interactions with your fellow human beings feel like gunfights with words ripping like bullets into your flesh and the sun shining into your room feels like a condescending, mocking smirk of superiority from the world outside. It completely warps the way you see the world and interact with other people in such a way that you keep wading deeper and deeper into that bog of misery driven there by specters from your own mind. There is no worse feeling watching seemingly from the sidelines as you slowly make your own life worse with your own actions, yet unable to intervene. I don’t profess to know how to escape from it; I don’t know if there is a way to get permanently out of the swamp of your mind. For some people it is medication, for others therapy. I don’t know what did it for me, but it feels like a switch flipped in my brain some weeks ago and my world has been slowly lighting up since then and I’ve actually used that light to go out and live my life and it has paid off and I feel like I am above the clouds where the sun is always shining. I have had people just come up to me to talk, I’ve made new friends who I really like talking to, I’ve had someone just randomly approach me and tell me they thought I looked cute and give me their number, I’ve sat in the sun and just basked in it and it never felt so lovely and warm before. I delight in every word I am able to speak in kindness and people’s voices are like music to me and my friends’ faces are the most beautiful paintings to rival the Old Masters and the world tastes so sweet I feel like my teeth might shatter and my cheeks cramp from smiling too much all day and I understand now what they mean by that seeming, false oxymoron, tears of joy.

I love living my life now and I look forward to each new day. Even if this does not last forever, and I’m sure it won’t, at least I feel like I’ve really lived now and however overcast the sky or dark the night might get, I will always remember the taste of sunshine on my face and as long as I carry those memories, I will find a way to climb back up this mountain to peek through the clouds and feel the touch of our mother star again.

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