I have faced indescribable depression for my entire life. Everyone says they understand what depression feels like, but I don’t think we do. We all face it, but we face it with different intensities, in different ways, and with different outcomes. Some of us don’t survive it. Some of us appear to survive but really we don’t. I spent my whole life contemplating death. I even spent a month acting it out and only narrowly survived. For years I regretted doing it, not because I lived, but because in the end I didn’t die.

40+ years of that kind of life ruins a person. Try to imagine, then, what it feels like when that person starts to see daylight for the first time. I’d always seen the sun, I knew what it did, I understood colors and seasons and relationships. I’d touched grass and wished on dandelions and swam in oceans. But I never enjoyed it. It made my life worse, experiencing beauty but never believing in it.

Somehow this year, and I don’t know how or why, I found a way to clear some of the film off my eyes. It feels surreal, and borrowed, and wrong. I don’t know the person in the mirror. She can run for four miles without stopping and fit into clothes only meant for other people. She dreams things that actually happen. She doesn’t use travel to escape, she accumulates experiences that inspire more and more and more experiences. They connect her to love she knew existed but had only vaguely realized.

Still, not all the clouds have cleared. I still have no fucking idea how to parent a teenager and the feeling of inadequacy abounds on all sides. Love feels tied to money and letting go, and how do you let go of the love letters your baby used to write you? My mother struggled with this too, and it ended up destroying us. We all have some lesson to learn here, but I feel like the test came too early and I haven’t scored very well. And where did the teacher go, anyway?

After a lifetime of keeping a quite literal death grip on life, it appears that I need to start trusting that the ground beneath my feet lies closer than I thought. I might need to stop trying to claw my way onto the cliff and instead let myself drop down below it. My family, my friends, my colleagues, all keep telling me the cliff belongs to other people too. They also need to find their way. And I need to believe that more than one path can lead to love.

If 2025 represented transformation, I think 2026 offers exploration. Where can these little wings go? I start this year thinking, “Now what?” Whatever paths I try, and wherever they lead, even if I end up right back on the edge of that cliff, now I have 2025 in my pocket. I own its mysteries and possibilities. What a gift. What a privilege.

What an understatement.