I've been into self reflection a lot lately. After my partner broke up with me last month, I went through a cacophony of emotion. I sobbed my way through countless ice cream sandwiches, booked a flight ticket back home and after too many drinks called back home one night and blew up at my ex partner for everything he'd done and had been and everything. to his credit, i'm surprised he sat there through almost the whole call - he wound up hanging up at some point.

And then I sat with myself again after that, realized something had shifted inside me. I couldn't feel bad about how I had yelled at him anymore, didn't feel the same sense of loss that had dogged me over the entire five weeks prior.

I started going to the gym again. I took a deep dive into my schoolwork, decided to create a Tinder account at the urge of some of my teammates. I found new sources of purpose, realized just how wide my network of friends was and who I could trust to lean on to help me process everything. I went on coffee dates with friends, wandered around the city with someone I'd been chatting with on Tinder.

Just a week after I'd wailed on the phone about how I thought I'd lost my spark, my shiny in life... the snow fell across the ground in a cozy blanket of white. I saw the northern lights stretch out my window after one particularly bad night, crying on the phone with my mom. I danced with my teammates on a karaoke stage, and twirled drunkenly with the one other girl on my team. I wandered into random churches, slept through sunrises and sunsets as the days shortened to less than a handful of hours. I turned to intermittent fasting and started to spend the dark evenings drinking black coffee and studying at the local student spot.

I took a breath. Exhaled. Allowed the pain to pass, and now I can look at everything with fresh eyes. See the doors that suddenly opened in front of me with the closure of that one.

I don't know what the future holds for me. And that's suddenly all the more exciting now, coming from someone who used to dream of the future in black and white, only a few paths here and there. It's like my future exploded in color for the first time in so, so many years.

May your world be full of color and self-love,

• Moqueca