There are times when I don’t want to feel the pain of depression. When I just want to hide and make all the pain go away. I just want to be numb. It is at these times that I do things to numb myself. I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t take anti-depressants. So I numb myself with playing stupid games on my kindle or surfing the internet or just spending hours reading reviews on Goodreads. Anything to hide from the pain.

But when I do that I miss everything else that is going on. I miss spending time with my family, being with my children and experiencing their growing up. Things that I will never again have. Everything gets numbed. It is not selective. I cannot hide from one thing. I end up hiding from everything. Hiding under the blankets means I can’t tell when the monster is gone.

I have begun trying to be present. To just be right where I am, right when I am. And it is hard. I don’t always succeed, but I am trying. I was trying to explain this to my husband and the best analogy that I came up with was giving birth. For me it was an amazing and life altering event. With my first I had a saddle block to block the pain. I felt not a lot from the waist down. I didn’t feel him enter the world. Don’t misunderstand me the birth and holding of my first child was beyond compare. When my second child was born I had him at home without any drugs or medication. At the precise minute when his head and shoulders cleared it was as though the universe opened and for that very brief second I felt part of the creation of the universe. I shared in the act of creation with God. All the universe was opened before me. And then it was gone. All of the pain and agony that led up to that moment had been worth it. I had a beautiful child. All was right with the world.

When I stay in the present and move through the pain or the flow of memory from the past I don’t miss the peace that comes when it has past and I am here in the present with the beauty that is around me. This for me is still a novelty. I still feel overwhelmed by everything and have an intense need to escape. But when I can breathe through and use the mediation mantras that I have learned to move through the dark times the light is so much brighter for having seen its arrival.

Learning to sit with the pain and accept it as part of who I am is a difficult journey. I have come to really like who I am . The things that make me different; the panic, the childish delight is so many things, the willingness to love. Who I am is the culmination of all the things that have happened to me and my response to those things. I am becoming more the person I want to be and creating that person from what I have always had. Sometimes those things are hidden. And I can only see that person when I am not trying to escape and or trying to numb myself.

I wish very often for a magic wand to make all the painful things go away. But they don’t. They are still there and when I am present with them . They do not seem quite so scary.