The Letdown After the Light

It’s strange how joy can feel like sunlight through a window — warm for a moment, but never meant to stay. You bask in it, glowing in the afterlight, and then suddenly… it’s gone. The sun dips, and all that’s left is the harsh flicker of overhead fluorescents.

Lately, it feels like I’m living in emotional whiplash — soaring one day, then slamming into reality the next. I leave an interview on a high, convinced I’ve got it in the bag… and then wake up the next morning hollow. The adrenaline drained like a river, leaving me dry, aching, and thirsty for the next good thing. 

It’s exhausting, how even the good moments come with a cost. Like your body doesn’t know how to hold joy without preparing for the fall. I try to savor it — the yes, the relief, the tiny wins…but somewhere in the background, my nervous system is already bracing. Already calculating how long I have before the glow wears off and I’m left trying to convince myself it was real at all…questioning the point of it. Frustrated that my brain let me down — again. 

More than anything, I think I just want something that lasts. A joy that doesn’t feel like a sugar rush. A win that doesn’t vanish overnight. I’m tired of chasing highs just to feel like I’m living — tired of the emotional cardio that comes with hoping and crashing and hoping again. I don’t need constant euphoria. I just want steady. Soft. Safe.

Finding steady is hard. Not the kind you build with routines or productivity — the kind that lives inside your chest. The kind that doesn’t disappear when plans change or life moves too fast. I don’t want a perfect schedule (at least not in this post). I want a peace that stays. A steadiness that isn’t so easily shaken by good news or bad sleep or one spiraling thought at 2 a.m. I want something in me that knows how to hold joy and come down gently when it fades.

I’m learning that internal stability isn’t about always feeling good — it’s about knowing I’ll come back to myself, even when I don’t. It’s less about staying on a high and more about building a softer place to land. I used to think stability meant consistency…like a schedule I could stick to or a mood I could master.

But I’m starting to realize it’s more about relationships — with myself, with my emotions, with the quiet in between. I’m learning to let joy visit without demanding it take up permanent residence. I’m learning that peace can be quiet and unremarkable…not a peak, but a pulse. That “lasting” doesn’t always mean forever. Sometimes it just means enough. Enough to carry me through the low. Enough to remind me I’m still growing. Enough to trust that when the light fades, I won’t fall apart with it.

Maybe the light was never meant to stay. Maybe it was only ever meant to remind me what warmth feels like — so I’d know how to find my way back to it. The letdown still comes, yes. But I no longer see it as a failure, or proof that the joy wasn’t real. It’s just the exhale. The echo. The warm place after the shine. And maybe that’s the steadiness I’ve been looking for all along — not the promise of always feeling bright, but the quiet knowing that even in the dim, I am still enough. Still whole. Still here.