My life in the sunshine season 1 trailer: chiiile, it’s a girl!

Feb 25, 2026

Thankfully the cat came into the bedroom. It was Snickers. She jumped on the bed, then leaped onto the window sill. I think she meant for me to get up. Or perhaps she could feel my distress from the other room. All I know is that her presence shifted me out of the spiral of fear and doubt.

I got up. Bare feet on cold hardwood. The house smells like Calla lilies and the smoky cedar wood candle I burned last night trying to calm myself down. It didn’t work then either.

Clawdia, Snicker’s sister, appeared in the doorway, judging me with those slow-blink cat eyes that say “you’re being dramatic again, human.”

She’s not wrong.

I walked to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The ritual of it…bag, lemon juice, honey, water, the button that makes the machine hiss and gurgle - this is what passes for meditation when your brain won’t stop attacking you at dawn.

While the tea steamed I stood at the kitchen window looking out at the Sequim sky. Grey. Always grey this time of year. The kind of grey that makes you forget what blue looks like.

And that’s when it hit me.

Not the fear this time. Something else.

A smell. No - a memory of a smell. Chicory coffee and tobacco smoke and something sweet and chemical I couldn’t name yet. My mother’s house. No - not her house. Before that.

The hospital.

I was suddenly back there. Not in memory. IN there. Like my body forgot it was 52 and standing in a borrowed kitchen in Washington State and decided it was January 1974 instead.

Chiiile! It’s a girl!

It was 54 degrees and partly cloudy on that January day in Lafayette, LA. I was born 6 pounds and 7 oz at Charity Hospital to a short, dark-skinned girl from Donaldsonville and a tall, slim, recently discharged from Vietnam dude from Morgan City.

They called me Starlet.

The tea machine beeped. I blinked. Sequim kitchen. Borrowed house. Cats. 52 years old.

I poured honey. Added lemon juice. Watched it swirl.

They called me Starlet.

I haven’t thought about that in years. The way my name sounded in my daddy’s mouth versus my mother’s. His voice made it sound like I was something rare. Hers made it sound like an accusation.

I took my tea back to the bedroom, opened my laptop and started typing.

Because if I don’t write it down now, if I don’t finally tell the whole story from the beginning - that voice in my head wins. The one that says who do you think you are?

I know exactly who I am.

I am Niche, government name-Starlet. First in my name from the house of Carbins.

And it’s time I told you how I got from Charity Hospital to this borrowed bedroom in Sequim with two cats, a worthiness spiral, a tea cup, and 52 years of surviving myself.