The SUN is the SON

I spent eighty-eight-point-six percent of my life sick, high, drunk, dissociated, angry, and afraid. That isn’t an exaggeration; it’s arithmetic. I could chart the years on a medical timeline—each season bracketed by a new prescription, a new diagnosis, a new theory about what was wrong with me. My calendar looked like a pharmacy receipt. I saw M.D.s the way the devout attend Mass: regularly, reverently, and always with the faint hope of absolution.

I learned to speak fluent Latin in the dialect of disease. Migraines, dysautonomia, gastroparesis, reflux, anxiety. My body became a revolving door of specialists—neurologist, gastroenterologist, psychiatrist, endocrinologist—each one passing me like a relay baton. I wore hospital bracelets like pilgrim beads. The rituals of recovery were endless: weigh-ins, scans, scopes, side effects, substitutions. When the SSRIs made me numb, the benzodiazepines made me compliant. When the painkillers quieted my head, they mutinied my gut. It was all data, all devotion.

Somewhere between the surgeries and the sobriety coins, I began to suspect that healing had become another religion, one that worshiped control. I tithed in co-pays and prayed to insurance algorithms. I chased every alternative—acupuncture, colonics, Reiki, raw food, moon water, and medical tourism—like holy relics scattered across continents. Each promised salvation; none delivered sovereignty.

A crack appeared in Cuba. A local medicine woman watched me double over on the floor of a paladar bathroom, emptying the contents of my stomach until there was nothing left but panic. She crossed her arms, unimpressed by my dramatics, and pointed—not to my abdomen but to my head. Then she tied a string around my temples, made me hold one end against my gut, and walked backward, muttering prayers that sounded older than the island itself. When she pressed an X into my belly with the edge of her hand, pain shot through me like a lightning rod, but I didn’t stop her. I was tired of polite medicine. I wanted miracles, even the primitive kind. Her message was simple: The problem isn’t in your stomach. At the time I thought she meant stress. Now I think she meant electricity.

For years I blamed my biology. But what if the circuitry was fine and it was the current that was wrong? What if the light itself—the quality of photons feeding my mitochondria—had been starved by the life I was living? I didn’t have that language yet, only the intuition that nothing I was doing with pills or plans had restored my pulse to nature.

Then came February 2020. I remember steam, a shower, the blur of preparing for a dinner out. The next frame is black. I was found face-down in the hallway, arms at my sides, my chin unapologetically taking the impact, consciousness split. In the hospital I recognized the room but not myself. The voice answering the nurses felt like a proxy, a version of me reading from an old script. Above the bed, another voice—older, calmer—narrated what to permit and what to refuse. It told me that no test would find evidence of what had happened because what had happened wasn’t failure; it was interruption.

After twelve hours of observation and zero explanations, I went home different. Something had rebooted. The next morning I woke before dawn without an alarm, walked outside, and faced east. The air was lavender with first light. I didn’t know why, only that my body wanted it. Every morning after that, I repeated the ritual: wake at five, walk barefoot if I could, let the sunlight hit my eyes before screens or coffee or thought.

Within weeks, I felt the static inside me begin to quiet. My headaches softened; my digestion stirred; the tremor of constant fear eased. I stopped needing noise to feel alive. The sun became my metronome—its rise resetting my circadian rhythm, its fall inviting rest I hadn’t felt since childhood.

Later I would learn the physics: how photons entering the eye calibrate the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the body’s master clock; how mitochondria are photoelectric engines translating light into ATP, life’s currency; how dopamine, cortisol, and melatonin dance to a choreography written by dawn. But I didn’t need a textbook to prove what my skin already knew. The light was re-coding me.

At first it looked like discipline—early wakeups, sugar gone, silence instead of scrolling. But discipline became devotion of a different kind: not obedience to doctors but reverence for design. My body stopped being a problem to fix and started being a conversation to listen to. I ate with the sun, slept with the moon, and noticed how my children’s laughter sounded different outdoors—fuller, like stereo instead of mono.

Healing, I discovered, wasn’t a transaction; it was a relationship. And like every relationship, it required presence. The sun taught me that light isn’t just illumination; it’s instruction. Each morning it whispered the same syllabus: show up, open your eyes, metabolize the moment.

I had chased transcendence in hospitals, in bars, in therapy, in lovers, in religions. It was always somewhere else—one more pill, one more prayer, one more plan. But the light was free and immediate, asking nothing but attention. Standing in it, I began to feel something ancient: coherence. My pulse matched the horizon. My breath kept time with photosynthesis. The noise of self-diagnosis dissolved into a quiet certainty that I was not broken—just disconnected.

The scientific explanation thrills me now: that the same photons fueling chlorophyll also instruct our mitochondria, that we are solar hybrids by design, not defect. The mystical translation is simpler: We are meant to face the dawn.

When people ask why I talk about the sun so much, I tell them because it gave me back what medicine couldn’t: rhythm, reason, and reverence. It turned my biology into an instrument that could finally play the song it was written for. It reminded me that health is not the absence of symptoms but the presence of signal.

Emergency medicine postpones a corpus from dying, but its in a noncompete with teaching humans how to live. The system that once promised salvation now looks to me like an algorithmic religion—diagnose, prescribe, repeat—while the real miracle hums outside the clinic walls. I am no longer a believer in perpetual emergency. I am a student of light.

So yes, I talk about the sun—a lot.

It is the only doctor that never billed me, the only therapist that never interrupted me, and the only light that never gas-lit me. It is the friend who showed up when I was face-down and said, 

Rise.

May light be your litigation.
May discernment be your due process.