My Sunshine

I am wearing a bright salmon-colored dress today, as well as perky lipstick and blush and an adorable headband. Normally, I dress almost exclusively in black, but I think I'm going to have to change that while I'm in Sweden, because as I was rifling through my wardrobe this morning, I had a thought that's both profound and embarrassingly trite: I need to be my own sunshine.

The sky has been a heavy shade of gray for weeks, and soon it will be pitch-black here about 20 hours a day. I'm far away from the people I care about (who, incidentally, are themselves spread around the globe), in a totally foreign country, and even before I came here I'd been floating from residence to residence and business trip to business trip for almost a year. It would be easy to feel quite adrift, given the circumstances. In fact, I awoke in an extremely bad mood this morning, from an extremely unpleasant dream, with the realization that I'm not homesick because I don't exactly know where home is anymore. Do nomads get homesick?

I realized that I've been putting out a lot of my own energy in that friendly, superficial way we all tend to do when we're new to a place/job/relationship and we want to be perceived as fun, bright, and polite. But that can become draining if you're just sort of acting, and not checking in with yourself about how you really feel. And if you realize that you really feel sort of shitty, then it becomes your job to change that.

The people I admire the most are always the ones who have tangibly overcome something. I have several friends who have withstood terrible family tragedies—one in particular who is perhaps the gentlest, sunniest person I know, despite the fact that her mother was murdered and her father is incarcerated. And I've had the honor, through my career in journalism, of interviewing some remarkable survivors—for instance, athletes who've lost both legs but use prosthetics to climb mountains and win marathons. Every now and then when I feel sorry for myself for some perceived hardship, I give myself a mental slap: Girl, you have your legs, your mom and your dad. Please stop whining.

And now I'm looking out the window with my colleague Maria, who has a bit of a black sense of humor, and we just noticed that through the peasoup clouds, there's a tiny circle of blue sky peeping out. "There must be some mistake," Maria mutters. But, somehow, I don't think so.