My first glimmer didn’t change my whole life. It showed me that a bright world still existed.
There was a time when the world lost its color.
I could remember the grass from when I was a child—how intensely, impossibly green it had been. I could remember a sky so vividly blue that it seemed like a thing you could fall into. But when I looked around at my adult life, everything felt flatter. Greyer. Muted.
I thought it was my age.
Which, looking back, is almost funny in the particular way depression can be funny: I was already sad, and then I became sad that the colors weren’t as bright as they used to be. I decided that this was simply what happened when you grew older. The bright world belonged to childhood, and I had somehow aged out of it.
But it wasn’t my age. It was depression.
I didn’t have moments of awe then. I didn’t feel inspired or surprised by beauty. Nothing reached into me and made me feel suddenly, vividly alive. After long enough without those moments, I stopped believing they would ever come back.
And this wasn’t a bad week or even a difficult season. It was years.
I remember talking about it with my therapist. By then, I wasn’t asking how to get that feeling back. I had mostly given up on the idea that I could. I was also still living with severe triggers from things that had happened in my life. They could pull me out of the present and into another dark place without warning, leaving my mind exhausted from surviving something that was no longer happening.
There wasn’t much room left for wonder when so much of me was occupied with bracing.
Then one day, I was sitting in my yard.
There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the day. My dogs were running around, playing fetch with me. I looked up—and the sky was blue.
Not just factually blue. It was blue the way I remembered it from childhood. The grass was green, really green, and my dogs were joyful and alive in front of me. For a few moments, I was overcome by the realization that the bright world still existed.
And for those few minutes, I felt better than surviving.
That moment didn’t cure my depression. It didn’t erase the things that could still trigger me or mean that everything was suddenly easy. But it gave me something I hadn’t had in a very long time: evidence.
The color was still there.
I would later learn the word glimmer, a term introduced by clinician Deb Dana. Glimmers are small cues of safety, connection, or well-being—often described as the gentler counterpart to triggers. They can be easy to miss: light through a window, a familiar song, an animal beside you, a sudden sense that, in this exact moment, you are here and you are okay.
That afternoon in my yard was my first glimmer—or at least the first one I recognized after all those grey years.
Once I understood that those moments still existed, I began to seek them out. Not by demanding that I be happy or pretending the darkness wasn’t real. I simply started paying attention to the small things that made the world feel briefly brighter. Each one became another piece of evidence that survival was not the only state available to me.
This is why glimmers matter to me. They don’t deny the darkness. They remind us that darkness is not the only thing that is real.
If the world looks grey to you right now, I won’t tell you to look on the bright side. I remember how impossible that can feel. I will only tell you this: the bright world may still be there, even if you cannot see it today.
And one day, the first thing that comes back might be the green.
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