Finding Air in the Darkness

September 16, 2025

Writer: Paige Schachtel

Editor: Sydney Miller

There's a particular kind of clarity that I think comes only after you've nearly drowned. I don't mean literally, though perhaps that metaphor isn't far off. I mean the psychological suffocation of carrying shadows you don't understand, of navigating mental illness before you even have the vocabulary to name what's happening to you.  

What emerges from that darkness isn’t just relief. It is a hypervigilance to light. When you’ve spent years unable to breathe properly, you develop an almost supernatural sensitivity to air.  

It’s like when you have a cold. Despite knowing logically that congestion is temporary, when you can’t breathe through your nose it becomes impossible to imagine ever being able to breathe normally again. Like this way of living will be your forever, this tight, suffocating reality, your new normal.   

And then you wake up one morning and your nose is clear and for those 5 seconds, the simple act of breathing through your nose feels magical. Something so small and ordinary, so taken for granted just days before, suddenly feels holy. But then within a day or two, you forget again. Your breathing fades back into background noise, and you lose that appreciation and longing that was once there. We forget entirely what it felt like to struggle for air.  

And I think it is perhaps this forgetting that is our greatest tragedy.  

Those of us who have lived in various forms of darkness, whether through anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, or the countless other ways suffering manifests, understand something crucial about the nature of relief. We know what it feels like to surface after drowning, to see light after being stuck in periods of extended darkness.  

The question, however, is how can we resist the inevitability of forgetting?  

Because in a world addicted to numbing and consuming, choosing to actively remember becomes radical. Choosing to notice becomes rebellious. 

Life is happening, and it’s not too small to notice: the sun setting on Zeppos tower, the taste of a perfectly cooked Rand cookie, the sunlight spilling across Centennial Park. The tiny ways the world shows up, even when we do not.  

So perhaps the real practice is training ourselves to recognize the overlooked moments that don’t feel significant enough to count, choosing to feel joy even when we are suffering, to see light, even with the memory of darkness still stitched into our skin. It's refusing to defer aliveness until some future version of ourselves finally has permission to be present. 

And I don’t think this means toxic positivity or ignoring our pain, but instead holding space for both – letting the memory of darkness make us more sensitive to light, not less. Instead of waiting until we break down to recognize our wholeness, we must remind ourselves of how good it feels to breathe. And maybe this is enough: to simply feel, to notice, to be present in our own breaths. To notice, with the precision and detail of someone who has lived without, the miracle that is our everyday life.