recovering sadness to find happiness again

i discovered this when i was sorting out my old emails. it's hard for me now to think of a time when i might have penned these words, but then again, i remember that i was deeply unhappy at the end of the last school year. it seems like so little time has passed between then and now, but then, i suppose this is true. and yet a lot has changed...

[in an email to a friend, who had lost a grandmother and was having an existential crisis of sorts, and on the nature of love and loss...]
I have dreaded the loss of loved ones all my life, and it has really affected the way in which I go about living and thinking about my relationships. Have I ever told you that my biggest fear when I was a kid was that someone I loved would disappear from my life, without ever knowing how I feel about them? Death and goodbyes seem to have the same effect on people, and I dread them both.
As a kid, I remember trying to imagine death, and I imagined a great emptiness, a blackness and blindness, and I imagined forgetting and being forgotten, all those I loved losing memory of me, losing traces ofthe relationships we cultivated in life. I would cry and cry, watching tear drops falling into my lap, big wet splotches on my dress.
I recall something of the last semester and it having this horrible aftertaste of sorts, how awful it felt to me after I left. I think a lot has happened to sour my look on life in the last few months of school, I guess with Western, and my being sick, and then personal things too, I think I became a very different and changed person in those final days. And it terrifies me, because I don't know that I much like the person I have become.
I suppose it's that I see myself as a much more callous person than I would like. I've become hardened to so many things, which I would like to take back, but I don't know if people transform as easily as that. I'm upset because in being so terrified of being hurt, I'm hurting my self.
[friend's name deleted], it is so good to hear from you again, and I hope this is not the last of our correspondences. This is not a good bye, nor even a good night. It's early morning here in Chicago, and I prefer that instead. Good morning, friend! It is going to be a better one now... Love, Stephanie

...
my friend dylan remarked to me that after watching some of my videos he felt that i was deeply sad or depressed. i spoke with him in chicago when he spent the night, in a way that surprised me in its intimacy and made me wonder why he and i had never spoken in this way to each other before.

we talked about the nature of conversation, about the importance of truth and spontaneous curioisty and candidness, of coming out with whatever is on your mind, paying no mind to contexts or retaining a conversational narrative.

i believe we achieved a greater understanding of what we want from our interactions, from our loved ones, of our loves. we discovered a greater meaning to voice and to voicing desires.
...

i need more conversations like that,
stephanie