This.
I just want to share that for a loooong time, years even. That I had been working on myself and processing trauma from failed relationships (both romantic and Platonic), dancing on the edge of depression and suicide from career and life set backs, including financial woes and a stint of homelessness. I slowly crawled my way out of this depression and poverty and tried to reclaim some sense of confidence and love for life only to find that my spark was gone, and had been replaced with a meloncholy feeling that I was just" happy that I had survived." Time was all I ever had, all any of us have really and I knew that I needed to be patient and kind to myself and eventually something might give and life would be genuinely fulfilling again. I had alway tried to employee this thinking but this feeling of being broken lasted for years and at times I had thought to resign myself to giving up on the idea that I could ever be truly happy or full of hope and vigor as I once had. Then, one day, when I least expected it, I had a chance encounter with someone who suddenly made me feel seen and heard. The kind of person who listened intently not just to the words you say but also the words unspoken, who could read the nuisance of your heart and see right through the mask we sometimes wear to protect ourselves. The sort of person whom you feel compelled to bare truths you haven't even shared with yourself and to do so without fear of judgement. This chance encounter woke me up again, ignited a spark that I had thought long since extinguished. Even if this person was only present in my life but for this brief moment I knew I would not waste this gift of renewal that no matter what happened I would fan this spark into a flame until it burned as bright as it ever did before. Meeting someone like that finally taught me the value of gratitude for the impermanence of things. Where I had once been willing to write off the inevitability of change as something that made a love for life futile and meaningless, I now learned how to cherish everything and everyone without my egos desire to control or Constrain them. Life has never been more lit since that faithful encounter and if you told me that day when I woke up that a complete stranger would come along and pick me out of a crowd of people to talk to and that they would unknowingly go on to completely and utterly undo the last six years of emotional uphevel and struggle I experienced in only a few hours I would have laughed in pessimism. Yet here I am, the happiest I've ever been in years and if you are out there reading this, please know I will always be thankful for the light in you that acknowledged the light in me. Im still a work in progress but at least now that good work feels like a privilege, an honor, a passion project as opposed to a choir or a story I had almost stopped writing.
