I’ve laughed more in the past sixteen months than I did in the previous thirty-two years — and that alone tells its own story.

Not polite laughter. Not nervous laughter. But the deep, unguarded kind that catches you off-balance and reminds you how good it feels to breathe freely again. The kind that happens around kitchen tables, on long walks, in passing comments that spiral into shared absurdity. Laughter that isn’t earned or managed — it just arrives.

It’s been nourishing in a way that’s hard to overstate. Healthy. Normal. Uplifting. The kind of normal that doesn’t demand explanation or justification. The kind where you don’t have to shrink, edit, or brace yourself. Where joy isn’t followed by tension, and lightness isn’t something you pay for later.

There’s something profoundly healing about real laughter — especially when it returns after a long absence. It reconnects you to your body, to safety, to the present moment. It reminds you that ease is not frivolous, and happiness is not something you have to earn through endurance.

Being back in that space — surrounded by people who feel familiar to your nervous system, who recognise your humour, your values, your essence — feels like coming home to yourself. Not a new version. Not a repaired version. Just you, uninterrupted.

And maybe that’s the quiet truth beneath it all:
when laughter returns, it’s not because life has become perfect — it’s because you’ve come back to where you were always meant to be.