When I read the first line of Emily Dickinson's “Hope is the thing with feathers," I imagine holding a bird as it flutters to escape, its heart beating fast, a small warm body desperate to be free. It might “perch in the soul," but not if you constrain it. You know it won't be happy caged so you set it loose, and who knows where it will go? You watch it fly away and send your hopes after it; you hope that it will thrive. It is not something to cling to but to set free to explore life's possibilities. You have to trust that it will come back to you in a time of storm. That it will sing unabashedly to you when you need it.

I didn't realize how much I'd let go of hope. Not entirely, not enough to give up. But hope had drifted. The process was slow and gradual enough that I didn't even realize it was going on. Living without a vibrant hope had become the base level of my experience, so I thought all was well. It was like being inside all the time under fluorescent lights and never seeing the sun. You're not in darkness, not in blackness or no light. Just in a flickering, gray-­green light that makes everything look a little harsh, a little grim. After a while, after days, or years, you forget what good, clean sunlight looks like. You forget how vibrant and bright the full spectrum is. I thought gray-­green was normal. Fluorescent light had become the standard I used to judge brightness and dimness, to determine what colors were true. I thought this was what hope looked like. When you don't often see sunlight, that kind of standard works. It speaks to your reality.

Then someone comes along and opens the door. They invite you outside, and you give a long-drawn “Ohhhh" as you look around, blinking, astonished, delighted, and remember. You look up with your mouth wide open and your eyes shining. You remember what it feels like, not to expect life to shrink all the time. And you commit the feeling anew to memory. More than that, you make a commitment to yourself to keep remembering: if you go back inside and the door shuts, you will know where the door is. You will remember the difference between half-­light and real light, between a dutiful slog from one “must" to another and a joyous romp between possibilities. And when the fluorescent ­light voice in your head says, “But those possibilities aren't for you," the sunlit voice will be there to say, “Who knows? Who knows what might happen? If not these possibilities, then others." It will sing to you, wordlessly like a bird, keeping you listening hard and reaching out farther and farther as you search for what it means.

A while ago I read that the opposite of depression isn't happiness, it's resilience. In a world of intuitive leaps, opposites don't always follow a straight line across a square; they can have oblique relations as well. I think the opposite of hope isn't despair, but drudgery. The opposite of the thing with feathers isn't a thing with scales (and fangs!); it's an ox with a strong back and its head bowed to pull its burden.

The opposite of light in the soul isn't darkness; it's that bank of fluorescent bulbs. The dark night of crisis you can cope with. You go into emergency mode, fight against the nightmares, pull out all the stops and overcome. Your friends and family leap to your support. When it's all over, you lick your wounds, panting, and look gratefully to the dawn.

But what is there to overcome in fluorescent lighting? You have enough light to see by—just not enough to show you the horizons, to play up the highlights and shadows or make anything sparkle. You have enough to keep you going—fairly cheerfully—day after gray-­green day. You buckle down and get the job done, and your friends mostly let you get on with it—alone, because who needs support against the half-light? You don't even think to ask.

In the half-light radiance isn't something you live; it's something you must remember, or even will into being. You must. You promise yourself. You will remember the voice singing wordlessly from the sunlight—the one that makes you lift your head and look up in wonder, heart fluttering, while you open the cage door wide to possibility.