I have been processing how terrifying 2025 has been. Often I feel that the slightest touch can make my fragile psyche spiral into panic. I want to feel better. I have been losing hope. I've felt helpless and powerless. I used to suffer through problems, but also found ways to live around them.. I never liked to label myself as a victim, but lately it’s been so overwhelming that I see myself only as a leaf in winds I can’t control.

I sought out those who had no desire to fulfill me. Isolated myself from those who care. Ran away from connections, thinking I don't deserve to take any space. I took emotional labor from my daughter's school, my job, the people around me. I apologized for things I didn't do, or things that didn't merit an apology.

For 6 months I've written entry after entry exploring my despair, my fingers grasping at the tattered edges of the pain to seek where it ends. Hoping that by making sense of it, I would heal, yet fretting that I was doing the opposite. Masochistically re-opening wounds because their pain reminded me that I am human. But I am spent. I need to dream about something. Imagine myself being present and at peace. I need to mask less. To stop ruminating. To give my head a break. To let the sun rise again.

In the end, I have this one life. This one life that I did not value. One life that I took upon myself to try to end. One life where I took every emotion, sound, and sight and let it crash over me like a wave until I fell to my knees. But fuck, this one life is beautiful too. It is the sound of children's laughter, seeing hummingbirds darting about, stopping to drink nectar, the scent of soil permeating the air.

The problems I had 3 years ago faded and no longer here, but new problems which pained me last month linger today. I need to trust that I can see this through, like I have before. Will all of this matter in five years?

So today I want to wish that every day I feel that good things can happen and hold them closer than the sad memories. To hope that’s enough to move on. To embrace my one life, instead of railing against the pain that distracts me so.

Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?
– Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built)