I have been depressed lately. Bouts of depression occasionally infiltrate. I’m such a hypocrite. I feel strongly that mental illness and disorders are physical illnesses that need therapy and medicine just like diabetes and broken arms, but I don’t treat myself like that.  “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Runs through my mind or, “You have no right to be depressed.”

Numbing oneself always breeds more depression.

Tonight I asked myself why? Why numb myself with food and television – that is when I’m not working, cooking and shopping, of course. Numbing oneself always breeds more depression.

A picture came into my mind of me and a knife. At first I was stabbing food, which is such an angst to me. My relationship with food, and how I abuse my body with it, anger me greatly. I saw myself stabbing the food and it felt so good. I stabbed it and stabbed it until it started to dissolve and I realized it was flesh. I kept stabbing it, in my mind, until it left deep gashes. I kept stabbing it even as I realized I was stabbing myself – realized it and kept stabbing away. I was stabbing my own heart and it was a bloody pulp in my mind. I asked God why I wanted to hurt myself. Why was I so angry at myself? What was it that made me hate myself. There was something lurking in the background of my mind. I saw a shadow of something in the deep gashes of my heart and grabbed it. It went through the cracks in my fingers and dissolved into nothingness.

A memory popped into my head of bad, unloving parenting on my part to my boys and then I caught my breath and realized how much I miss my boys. I felt like I missed their entire lives and with them in another state, I’m continuing to miss watching them grow into men. I miss my boys. I remember all the wasted chances I had to spend time with them while they were growing up. The stabbing slows and the tears flow.

I fear of what I’m going to do with this pain if I let it come up and experience it. How can I survive it? At least I will be living and feeling something – anything. I’m not sure if this was the shadow that flitted across the bloodied stabbed heart of mine, but I’m getting close – close to something, maybe healing.