You’ve always felt different from a young age. You grew up being told you weren’t enough. These would be the voices of a permanent gloom, a cloud that would follow you for the rest of your life.
Yet you try outrunning your cloud. You pick up self-help books. You play motivational podcasts on repeat. You adopt the billionaires’ morning routines. But nothing changes. You’re still you. Only now you take cold showers and meditate as soon as you wake up.
In a blink of an eye, your teenage years disappear behind you. You’ve garnered a few decades of life experience, but the dark cloud keeps looming.
So you fall in line. You stop daring to dream. That’s what adult life is, right? Dealing with rain and shit? You try your best to ignore the dark and do what everyone else is doing.
You find a career in accounting because it’s safe. You iron your collared shirts but feel awkward in them. You’d rather deal with words than with numbers, but a ‘proper career’ pays the bills. Then you’re retrenched with nothing left to your name.
And still the gloom remains.
Everywhere you go, whatever you do, the darkness never leaves. It’s almost as if the darkness is you. Run fast enough, for long enough, and you’ll avoid it for a while. But stop to catch your breath and you get rained on. Plus, the water always ruins your best shoes.
You’ve tried self-medicating. Exercise. Breath work. Sex. Nothing helps.
That’s until you break. You turn around and thrust a fist at the gloom. “Fine then!” you yell. “Rain! Rain all you want!” You fling your last pair of dress shoes into the cloud and stomp your bare feet in the growing puddle.
But you can’t stay wet forever, so you buy an umbrella. That’s how you become ‘the guy with the umbrella’. And guess what? Guys with umbrellas get to protect others from the rain.
Day by day, you shield other stragglers from their gloom. Day by day, you feel lighter, despite your own darkness.
Then one day, someone special steps under your umbrella. You walk together, and in that brief moment, they show you what it’s like to have light in your life. Light that would turn your rain into rainbows. They’re the type of rainbows that have you carving words like ‘1110’ or ‘EKWUM’ into a tree. Meaningless words in general; words that mean the world to you both.
But life isn’t a fairy tale. And there’s no stopping this person from wrenching the umbrella off your hands, leaving you alone with your cloud once more. Only this time it’s not rain you’re dealing with, but a thunderstorm.
Things are different now, though. Maybe you’ll learn to dance in the rain, maybe not. But one thing’s for certain: you’re no longer afraid of the gloom.
Because it’s in the darkness where you found your joy in the first place.
Stuart Danker 
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