"Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning."
-Psalm 30:5b
My fear of the night lasted about a year. I often could make it through the day without succumbing to my mental despondency, but at night this always changed. It's as if the darkness of the world around me then mirrored the shadows of my mind, bestowing an inescapable omnipresence upon them. Slogging away at homework, the despair consumed me. I could not live by days or hours but by minutes, slowly counting down the time until I could finally sleep. Sleep was my only reprieve from the pain. At the same time, as I sat at my desk my fingers itched to grab the pair of scissors nearby, my medication.
I also realized quickly that the less sleep I got, the worse was my mental state. Manifested in suicidal thoughts and the cuts on my arm, I dreaded each night even more than waking up in the morning. I remember telling my friends one night in particular that I certainly could not hang out with them. Of course I wanted to, but my abounding fear paralyzed me. I writhed at the thought of waking up tired the next morning. And thus, night brought an agonizing terror not simply by its dark nature but also by the mere thought of losing sleep in its duration.
Somehow, I made it through. Contemplating the meaning behind all of it often brought me trouble. Why would God do that to me? He assured me later on that He was with me through it all. But why? What did it matter if He was with me if it still felt like hell? Recently, however, a thought struck me. Times come when part of me longs to drown in sorrow and apathy as I did back then. It is an intense desire, and not a logical one given the quality of my life during those times. Yet, I realized that in this time I received a greater capacity to feel. I empathize more easily, and I long to help others as the pain of the world brings its own grief to my mind. After what felt like an eternal night, morning broke.
It broke in that I found sun in my life. Sun in loving the people around me more strongly. Sun in the beauty of creation. Sun in the tears that come to my eyes at the sorrowful ways of the world. Before the night came, I struggled to feel in this same way. Though always a sensitive person, this sensitivity perhaps hardened me from giving myself fully to the world. Depression stripped me of this hard demeanor. Although it changed me for the worse while it held captive my mind, upon release I became a more complete person as compared to the my previous one. It saved me from apathy and disengagement. In uncovering a reason behind everything that happened, the typical why that we all ask, that I too asked, I find that I would no longer take back this time. Joy truly does come in the morning.