When I first came to South Carolina, I hated it. It is rare for me to feel this way about any place. When I arrived at the airbnb I would be living in for the next three months, I tried, I really tried to choose to love it. And at first I did. And then something happened that made me hate it more than any other place.

People have called me sunshine since I was little. Mostly it’s because of my smile. Some say my eyes. My favorite song is ‘you are my sunshine’. My mom used to sing this to me when I was little and couldn’t sleep, which was often. I whisper this song to myself now when I’m feeling sad, it makes me feel brave and special. The thing about being sunshine… I wish my sunshine wasn’t threatened or challenged. And I wish it wasn’t expected. But I’ve learned recently, loving the place I now am, that sunshine is essential, it is not required, sometimes it’s not expected, most often it is, but that’s not what’s important. I spent so much of my life trying to match people’s expectations for me that I forgot who I was, or perhaps I never truly knew. When I first became a travel nurse, zipping twenty two hours on up to the tip-top of the US, I unfolded. It was as if my entire self had been inside me, lurching, screaming, aching to be seen, then in the place where the mountains meet the sky and the water meets the mountains, I exploded. Everything I was suddenly became the only thing. I have learned more about myself in these past fourteen months than I have in my entire life. I have learned that most often, each day presents with clouds. Sometimes the sky is the very essence of clouds. Sometimes the sun says hello, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes rain breaks free of it’s puffy prison and sometimes fog is all one can see. I have mastered the art of withholding expectations but never being apathetic. I refuse to be a person who doesn’t try. I refuse to be a person who doesn’t see. I refuse to be someone that stunts her own growth, or worse, the growth of others. And I refuse to be someone that doesn’t choose.

I have decided that this is the year of the sunshine souls. The souls that love life. The ones that listen with their entire self. Those that see greatness, or potentials for greatness, everywhere they look. The ones that laugh with their heads to the sky. I’ve been told it is the year of the rat, but for me, it’s the sunshine souls.