I have learned to refer to different aspects and parts of life as "seasons." Some seasons feel like the coldest, stormiest winter, and others feel like the most perfect sunny day there could be. I believe the past few years have been quite a wintery season, one that I had no idea would last so long, and one that would leave me a changed person.

I do not wish to discuss any details of my wintery season, because I want readers to be able to focus on their own lives while reading this, not my own. What I plan on sharing is how I learned to love life again.

I am quite a perfectionist, so I expect everything in my surroundings to go swimmingly to be considered "good". That is quite literally how I have thought my whole life, and maybe you think like that as well. What I have to say is that that is not the mindset to live in. I would know, because it has been my mindset for years, and made me miss out on a lot of good things, and look back at times with remorse and regret. I believe a correct mindset that has helped me learn to love life is that life is not based on highs and lows, or defined by goods and bads. It is full of them, for sure, but cannot by any means be based on trials or even beautiful events.

With therapy and genuinely taking this summer of time off from school to learn how to make life light again, I adjusted to multiple new mindsets. All of which have contributed to me rediscovering my love for life. For a long time, every day was a chore. It was living in fear of something bad happening or ruining good times by being scared. I do not wish I could get those winter years back, because I enjoy life now. I feel every kind of emotion there is depending on the day. By writing this I do not mean to seem as if I possess a consistently sunny mood, because I simply do not. I just live life without as much fear, and without focusing solely on the negative events that plague life every now and then.

This is a new feeling for me, but I am ready to embrace all of it. The good and the bad.