What the Clouds Leave Behind

Finding light in expected places

Sunday morning I woke up at 4:30am. Sleep wasn’t coming back, and in those quiet hours I often hear my friend’s voice in my head: “go see it.” This friend is always chasing a sunrise on the ocean, and I’m lucky enough to live just a few minutes away. By 5:30, I was in the car, headed toward the beach.

On the way, I saw streaks of pink and blue stretching across the sky above the tree. I immediately thought this is why I do this. But when I reached the beach, the view was not what I expected five minutes earlier. No rainbow pastels. No brilliant glow. Just heavy, dark clouds sitting directly where the sun should rise.

Disappointment sank in. I sat in my car for a few minutes wondering, is this worth staying for?

The longer I looked, the more the contrast between the dark sky and the faint light trying to push through caught my attention. It pulled me back to a couple of years ago. My existence felt like clouds were everywhere. The more I searched for a path, the more lost I was. For much of my thirties, chasing even the slightest light at the end of a tunnel was my reality.

The clouds, when they show up in life, are never invited. No one asks for despair, for uncertainty, for the rug to be pulled out from beneath them. Yet we all experience these moments. A storm you can’t predict, forcing you into a survival state you don’t even recognize. The harder you try to push forward, the cloudier it gets.

For me, the clouds rolled in when I abandoned myself for someone who didn’t deserve the devotion I gave. That choice shattered my sense of safety. What followed were years of pushing forward on the surface while, inside, my body, mind, and spirit begged me to stop. Stopping didn’t feel like an option then. So I pushed harder, went faster. Logic told me that if I tried enough, life would eventually open up.

Instead, each day added another invisible weight, pulling me deeper. In those depths, I wondered if the light would ever return.

At first, I realized how I was feeling was burnout. The physiological collapse of my nervous system after years of neglect. But this entire experience was more than that, it was also a spiritual awakening. Before I had words for it, I used to say it felt like a call from the inside. Later, I learned some call it the Dark Night of the Soul.

At the time, I didn’t know how to answer that call from the inside. If someone is screaming at you in a different language, it takes effort to connect. I didn’t know how to let go of the life I thought I was supposed to have. There was a perceived sense of safety in the stability. People don’t leave their jobs without having something lined up. My career was the last thing I had to claim as my own, how could I stop that? Eventually, the feelings were too much. The calling was too loud. I made a calculated decision to take a summer break where I thought time and a new job would fix my life.

My summer break turned into an extended pause. The pause felt like a new language. Rest became the first way I could begin to hear the loudness inside me. It wasn’t pleasant. Often it felt like punishment. Why me? Why do I have to stop? Why don’t I get to be like everyone else?

That season became a lesson in both healing and feeling. The clouds were still there, but small cracks of light began to break through. I started to notice longer stretches of good days than bad ones. Slowly, I learned that healing isn’t a straight line. It is more like a spiral. The clouds still appear but you can move through them quicker.

Throughout my healing journey, opportunities would appear and my nervous system would leap ahead, convinced, this must be the happy ending… this must be what all this heaviness was for. I’d feel like I was finally approaching an exit ramp, a chance to get off this highway and return to a “normal” life if only the next steps aligned. But each time, the ramp turned out to be a facade. There was no way off, and with every disappointment, I found myself back in the clouds, wondering why.

Last August, they came back suddenly. It was like a wall of dark clouds building on the horizon and pushing forward until the sky has blackened. They were dark and heavy causing my anxiety to spike. My thoughts were not my own and my energy collapsed. It felt even harder than before, because this time I had something to compare it to. I had spent the spring and early summer feeling the best I had in years. To lose that without explanation was an unbearable ache.

This time, though, I didn’t run. I sat in the storm. I remember looking at the darkness almost like a challenge: I know you’re here. You’ll leave again. I am strong enough to sit with you now. A few days later, the light began to return. That’s when I realized these periods weren’t punishment, they were refinement. Invitations to shed what no longer served me.

A dear friend once gave me an image that has stayed with me. She said these moments are like standing at TSA. You know that feeling— your bag is on the conveyor, the officer pulls something out and says, this liquid can’t come through, or this item is too big. You don’t get to argue. If you want to reach your destination, you have no choice but to leave it behind.

While the outside reality is unavoidable, you still have to face the breakup, the treatment, the loss, etc, being stripped bare in this way forces an inner transformation too. It’s not only about what you’re told you can’t carry forward on the outside. It’s also about what you release and reclaim within yourself.

That’s when I began to notice something shift. The more I stopped waiting for some outside rescue to pull me through, the more I started to see my own light emerging. Those life rafts I had once clung to would floated me for a little while, but they never carried me very far. I always ended up back in the clouds. It wasn’t until I began listening inward, trusting my own voice, my own needs, that the path forward truly began to open.

What I hadn’t expected was how the balance of life would shift once I began to step into more light. For so long it felt like it was just me, lost in my clouds, while everyone else carried on with normal life. But this past year, I’ve watched close friends find themselves in storms of their own. Heartbreak. Illness. Grief. Loss.

I haven’t lived their exact experiences, but I recognize the ache instantly. The longing for life to just feel normal again. The urge to press fast-forward through the pain. The desperate search for something outside yourself that might make it all go away. That’s the common thread of the clouds, no matter how they arrive, the ache inside is something we all know.

Since I’ve walked through my own darkness, I can hold theirs differently. I know there isn’t an express lane out of it. I know the distortion and hurt is deeper than what anyone shows you on the surface. There is a limit to how much I can “fix” them. Instead, I send love and steady energy, trusting that the light will return for them in its own time. When it does, they’ll find themselves standing in a new place too.

Walking through my own storms taught me something important: the external realities have to be faced, you can’t skip the treatment, the heartbreak, the process of loss. But what ultimately shifts everything is turning toward yourself. When the life you thought you had is suddenly stripped away, ask: Who do I want to be now? What do I need? What do I want the path ahead to look like?

That’s when the cracks begin to open. That’s when the light pushes through— not from the outside, but from within. Eventually, after all the heaviness, you find yourself in a brilliance you almost missed, like a sunrise breaking through the clouds.

Spring Lake, NJ