“Do not fight against pain; do not fight against irritation or jealousy. Embrace them with great tenderness, as though you were embracing a little baby. Your anger is yourself, and you should not be violent toward it. The same thing goes for all your emotions.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
For a long time, heaviness and dark feelings were very familiar to me. In a strange way they were comforting; I felt safe in darkness. The light felt more painful to me, but I also wanted to change because I wanted to free myself from the limitations of staying in the dark.
I first started struggling with depression when I was young. From an early age my mother told me there was something wrong with me, particularly when I dared to express “negative” feelings, like anger. It became a mantra that filled my mind all the time. This one statement pervaded my entire life and dramatically affected the choices I made and didn’t make, well into adulthood.
In my early forties, after much searching, I hit rock bottom. I was lying in bed, wanting to die, my thoughts telling me how wrong I was as a human being, when another thought popped into my mind: “What if depression is a gift?”
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