The Blue Light | Coping with life-altering events and chronic illness support.
Updated: Aug 29
Searching for myself in the darkness I discovered the blue light that surrounds us.
I know darkness. I've lived in it. And for a long time, I believed the story it was telling me: that the darkness was taking something from me. That each day spent in the dark was a day subtracted from the person I used to be. That the goal, the only goal, was to get back to the golden light. To return. To recover. To walk out of the storm the same color I walked in. And for a long time, I believed the story it was telling me: But I was wrong.
If you live with chronic illness, or dealing with a life-altering event, you also know the darkness I'm talking about. It is not the poetic darkness. Not the metaphorical kind that writers use when they want to sound deep. The real kind. The kind that settles into your bedroom at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday when the curtains are drawn and your body has decided that today is not a day you get to participate in the world.
The kind that comes with the silence of a house that has moved on without you — dishes in the sink, a phone that stopped buzzing hours ago, the distant sound of life happening to other people.
The kind of darkness that makes you wonder if you're still here.
Here's something I learned that changed everything
The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe believed that color is born where light and darkness meet. Light passing through darkness becomes yellow-golden, warm, familiar. But when darkness is touched by light, it becomes blue. Not gone. Not defeated.
There's a scientific name for part of what happens: the Purkinje effect. It's a biological phenomenon where, in dim light, the human eye begins to perceive blue tones as brighter while warmer colors fade. In other words, your eyes literally adapt to the dark by learning to see blue. Your biology changes to help you find the light that matters in low-light conditions.
I think chronic illness does that to your soul. It adapts you. It changes what you can see. And what you learn to see, what becomes visible, what becomes bright when everything else goes dim, this is the blue light.
Blue is what darkness becomes when it meets light.
The darkness doesn't destroy the light. It transforms it. Changes its frequency. Makes it something deeper, steadier, harder-won.
I think about this when I'm in my own dark room. I think about how the version of me that existed before chronic illness — the golden version, the one who could go and do and be without calculating the cost — that version didn't disappear in the dark. She sank. She deepened. She changed frequency the way a song slips into a different key. In the quiet when there was no longer any strength left to be the easy, golden version of herself, she began to tell the truth.
And the color of that truth was blue.
Blue Is Not Less Than Gold
We live in a world that worships gold. Brightness. Productivity. The person who bounces back. The before-and-after photo where the after is somehow bigger and shinier than the before. We're told to fight the darkness, to push through it, to find the light at the end of the tunnel. But what if we are the light inside the tunnel?
What if the storm doesn't exist to be survived? What if it exists to transform us — not into lesser versions of our golden selves, but into something with more depth? More weight? More truth?
Blue light is not the light of someone who has given up. Blue light is the light of someone who has been through something and is still here. Still glowing. Not because we chose it, no one chooses the darkness I am speaking about, but because that's what happens when our back was pushed against the wall of darkness and refused to go out.
You don't break. You transform. You become blue light. Still here, still glowing, even in the dark.
Here is the part about the darkness that no one tells you: we can see each other.
We don't need the lights on to find each other.
The woman three states away, lying in her own darkened room at 2 a.m. — I see her blue light. The man who hasn't left his bed in four days — he sees mine. The teenager who just got diagnosed and is terrified — we see them, glowing faintly, not yet knowing that the blue is coming, that it's already starting.
We learned a different language in the dark. Not the bright vocabulary of "getting better" — the blue vocabulary of "still being here." Of "still being here and calling it enough." Of "still being here and calling it brave."
I think chronic illness does that to your soul. It adapts you. It changes what becomes visible and teaches you to notice what begins to glow when everything else goes dark.
This is the blue light. The people who are still here, the connections that don't require physical proximity, the kind of love that grows steady and low, a love that does not need an audience to be real.
So, here's what I want to say to you if you're in the dark right now.
· If you're lying in a room that's too quiet, in a body that's too loud, wondering if you still count — you do.
· If you're watching the world move on through a screen, you're too tired to hold, wondering if you've been
forgotten — you haven't.
· If you're grieving the golden version of yourself and wondering if blue is enough —Blue is enough.
Blue is not the absence of your light. Blue is what your light becomes after it has been through something. It's what remains when the easy warmth is stripped away and what's left is deeper, steadier, more real than anything gold could touch.
And the blue light you carry? It travels farther than gold ever could. It reaches the comment section at 2 a.m. It reaches the darkened bedroom in a town no one's heard of. It reaches the person who has stopped believing anyone will understand and says — without shouting, without proof, without the lights on:
I'm here too.
I see you.
You're not alone in the dark.
This Is Thriving in the Storm
Thriving doesn't mean the storm ends. It doesn't mean you go back to gold. It means you learn to glow in the color the storm gave you. It means you find the other blue lights in the dark and you hold each other steady, not with hands that need to be in the same room, but with the kind of presence that only people who have been in the dark can offer.
In the darkness, there is blue light that surrounds us.
It is ours. It is earned. It is enough.
This post is part of a collection of writing, art, and community content exploring what chronic illness reveals, not what it takes. If this spoke to you, share it with someone who needs to see their own blue light today.
Coping with life altering events and chronic illness support
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