First Light

Shay McEwan (She/Her) - Te Whānau a Kai, Ngāti Pāhauwera, Ngāti Porou

C.W. Suicide

There’s a particular darkness that belongs only to the hour before morning.

It’s not the darkness of midnight. Midnight is settled, complete; it asks nothing of you.

The hour before morning is different. The sky is still dark, but somewhere beyond what you can see, something has already begun to change.

I think there are moments in life like that. They rarely announce themselves. There’s no revelation, no clean line between before and after, and sometimes you are simply living inside the same darkness you have known for years, and then one ordinary morning you catch yourself laughing at something, or making plans, and you realise you are no longer the person who walked in.

I have known darkness, more than I would’ve liked, and earlier than I should’ve.

I have known what it is to lose people I loved, to learn things about grief at an age when I should have been learning something else entirely. I have known heartbreak, and disappointment, and the strange loneliness of losing your sense of direction and wondering whether everyone else was handed a map that never reached you. I have known what it is to sit with the parts of yourself you would rather not look at, and I have known the exhausting weight of trying to become more than what life seemed to expect of me.

For a long time, I thought those were separate things, separate chapters, separate versions of myself, each one survived and left behind, but now I think they were all the same stories.

Something strange happens when you have been through enough. People begin to describe you by your resilience and tell you that you’re strong. They tell you that you have been through so much, and they mean it kindly, so you smile, because what else is there to say?

But there are days when I don’t want to be strong.

I don’t want my suffering to be the most interesting thing about me. I don’t want everything I survived to be the reason someone decides I am worth listening to. I want to be more than what happened to me.

That is where my idea of growth began to change.

Growth is not always becoming stronger. Sometimes it’s becoming softer, admitting that something hurt, and letting it have hurt, without rushing to turn the wound into wisdom. Sometimes it’s simply being able to say: that was hard, and that changed me, which is why I’m still here.

For years, I thought moving forward meant leaving things behind. I thought healing meant arriving one day as some untouched version of myself, clean of all of it.

I don’t think she exists.

We don’t get to become untouched. We become changed, and we learn to carry things differently.

So I started carrying the younger versions of myself more gently than I used to. The little girl who didn’t understand why certain things hurt so much, the teenager who was certain heartbreak was the end of the world, and the young woman who felt lost and had no idea what came next, who had to learn how to keep going long before she understood why.

I don’t look at her and wish she had been stronger.

I look at her and think: you did enough, you made it here.

And here is not where I thought I would be.

There was a time when I couldn’t picture my future at all. There was an assumption I had that I wouldn’t be alive right now, that my plans after my dad’s suicide would’ve worked and I followed in his footsteps. But now, I am studying again, leading, speaking in rooms where I once quietly wondered whether I belonged.

Alongside that, I’m learning te reo Māori, slowly, imperfectly, my mouth still finding its way around words that have been waiting for me my whole life. I’m learning more of my whakapapa, and I am learning that reconnecting does not have to be perfect to be meaningful. I am learning to speak even when my voice shakes, and I am learning that I can take up space without apologising for standing in it.

None of that erased what came before. It grew alongside it, and that is the part nobody warns you about: the good does not replace the hard. They live in the same person, at the same time, and perhaps that is what first light asks of us.

Not to pretend the night never happened, not to be grateful for every painful thing we endured, not to force meaning onto what was simply painful, only to notice that the night is not the only thing that exists.

There is something deeply comforting in that. The sun rises whether we are ready or not. It doesn’t wait for us to have everything figured out.

And it doesn’t arrive all at once. First there is the faintest change in the sky, so slight you could talk yourself out of seeing it, then shapes, then colour, and then, suddenly, you can see much further than you could a few minutes before.

Nothing has really changed. The road is still the road, the mountains are still the mountains, your history is still your history, but you can see it differently, and maybe that is what healing is: not changing what happened but changing what you believe is possible afterwards.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going, and I’m not sure I’m supposed to, and for the first time, I’m comfortable with becoming because there is freedom in not having to arrive as the finished version of yourself. I can still be learning, still uncertain, still healing, and still moving forward.

I spent so long believing the darkness was something I had to conquer, and now I think I only ever needed to learn how to walk through it.

There were nights I thought would never end, and there were versions of myself I thought I would never outgrow, and moments when I couldn’t imagine the person I would become.

And yet, somehow, I became her, not perfectly, not without scars, and not without looking back.

Because first light was never about becoming someone who has never known darkness. It’s about becoming someone who knows the darkness cannot have her forever.

I’m not leaving my past behind. I’m taking it with me, the people I have loved, the lessons, the mistakes, the grief, the laughter, the parts of myself I once thought I had to hide. All of it comes.

It just doesn’t get to choose the direction anymore.

Because there is so much ahead, more to learn, more to become, more people to love, more places I have never seen, more words I haven’t yet learned to say, and more mornings I have not yet witnessed.

Not to pretend the night never happened, not to be grateful for every painful thing we endured, not to force meaning onto what was simply painful, only to notice that the night is not the only thing that exists.