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I woke up this morning to a wooly gray sky and a humid, heavy breeze tumbling through my bedroom window.

For once, the dubious weather has saved itself for a Tuesday (rather than a Sunday), and the sunshine lasted through our entire three-day weekend. That’s impressive, for Vancouver. It’s not that we don’t get sunshine, mind you, but we don’t always get it on the days when anyone has time or opportunity to use it.

You get used to it, after a while… laughing at the weather forecast because the timing is so absurd.

I’ve been feeling a bit cloudy myself lately, but it really seems as though I shouldn’t be. Why am I through a low pressure system at the wrong time. Shouldn’t I be more shiny? More thankful? More positive?

But I’m so Vancouver right now: reliably unreliable. The only constant is that I feel things at the exact time I’d really rather not.

Whenever I look back at the last couple years of my life and classify them as ‘difficult’, I rush to remind myself of all the good things that have happened in that time. The move I’ve made to a better home. A job that is stretching me. The friendships that have developed in odd and perfect ways. The discoveries I’ve made about my health that enable me to move in a direction, rather than wonder, wonder, wonder.

It has been difficult, though. I can’t pretend otherwise. The things I have to be thankful for are huge doses of comfort along the way, but they don’t always buffer the experiences that have etched lines into my face and scars onto my body.

I’ve been scared. I’ve been lonely. I’ve been disappointed. I’ve been angry. At myself, at other people, at intangible entities like ‘life’ and ‘love’ and ‘happiness’.

I’ve wanted things to miraculously change or evolve or work out in some direction that appears sunny and good and easy… but every time I think I’m going to get a break?

Overcast.

I do feel good a lot of the time, mind you.

I sing and dance like the random freak I always was. I can see the humour in everything from a weird boomerang ladybug I was trying to knock off my arm yesterday to pretty much everything Catherine and I do together. I wake up in the morning ready to run, and go to bed at night most of the time with a head full of thoughts that are not negative at all (mostly just random.)

I just have some questions and empty spaces that I am learning to live with.

I have some regrets that I am trying not to use like a brick wall against my head.

I have some unrequited desires I am managing as best I can.

I have some lists from which I have yet to scratch a single item.

I have some serious bumps in the road that I’m not going to be able to steer around.

I’ve screwed up a few things I can’t fix.

But.

As cloudy as it is now, or as cloudy as it might be in the future, the sun always shows up again eventually.

I have faith in more things than not.

And like a true Vancouverite, I’ve learned that the weather can’t change how you live your life, anyway.

It’s just a good excuse to buy boots.