sunny with a chance of depression
today's "flourish friday" is about healing old wounds, fulfillment, and finding the sunshine even when it's storming
*Cover photo by by Linda Xu on Unsplash*
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As I lay in bed last night, I wondered what the cause of my fatigue was. It could be jetlag, considering I'd just spent a week in Amsterdam, where I was living in the future, seven hours ahead of the timezone I was accustomed to. Maybe it was my autoimmune disease yelling, "Hey, don't forget about me," as if it ever could be so easy. And then I wondered if it was the slow burn of an oncoming depressive spell that had no rhyme or reason other than feeling entitled to control my life. I prayed I wouldn't wake up "sad for no reason" and drifted off to sleep.
It wasn't until Saturday that I felt much better in Amsterdam after becoming ill just a few minutes before boarding my flight on Tuesday evening. I'll save you all the details, but I was a mess; that was the most miserable nine-hour flight of my life. So even though the weather was, for lack of better words, complete shit, I hopped on the metro and went into the town center, eager to reset my trip. I was in a tattoo shop, getting directions from the person there to a nearby piercing shop, when they said, "You bring the weather with you wherever you go." I was momentarily perplexed because we weren't talking about the weather. I soon realized they were acknowledging my pleasant demeanor. More importantly, they were acknowledging the importance of being mindful of how our attitude impacts those around us, intentionally or not.
I felt the annoyance rising as my recent therapy shifted from me recapping my Amsterdam trip to somehow stumbling into my laundry list of daddy issues. My dead father doesn't haunt me in my house like you'd expect some ghost to. Instead, he appears in my dreams, in my way of being, and in all those trauma responses that I clumsily misidentified as quirks.
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