Sadness and Prayer by TP (AI Art)

There are moments when, for seemingly no reason at all, I am weighed down by sadness. Sometimes it’s a fleeting moment, it passes like a breeze, and the heaviness leaves almost as fast as it arrived. Other times the sadness creeps in like a snake wrapping itself around my body, pressing in and becoming tighter and heavier no matter how much I try to resist.

I am not typically a sad person, but I also have not responded to disappointment, discouragement, or sadness in the healthiest ways. I turn to entertainment or food to quiet these intrusive emotions. I medicate the mood because I don’t know how to change it.

I learned at a young age to escape from real trauma through pleasure. I learned to feed myself to distract my mind from the realities that left me feeling lonely and insecure. I learned to take care of myself for the moment, so if even only for that brief space of time, I could get a break from the hurt.

I have since learned and relearned better ways to move through the challenges and disappointments. I have anchored my identity in Christ, and in this discovered, or rather firmly committed, to the belief that I am loved, chosen, and changed through Jesus.

Like the old GI Joe slogan goes, “Knowing is half the battle,” and the other half seems to be habits. Many times, before I have even fully considered where a lonely thought is coming from, I am already scrolling for entertainment or reaching for a treat. It doesn’t take much for me to mindlessly escape from even the smallest difficulty.

I am improving, learning to pause and pray, but habits are hard to break—harder still to always want to break. When I am truly dialed in on the things that matter, the temptations that are common to mankind have little grip on me. [1 Corinthians 10:13] But staying in that space is hard; it’s hard to always choose to think beyond the present moment and to consider the consequences of choices.

Of course, all this is just a need to renew my mind. To think on the good things, to think on the God things. But even in this, if I’m honest, I sometimes feel the sadness. Why can’t my mind stay new a little longer? Will I ever find myself mindlessly reflecting on my true identity instead of returning to the vomit I rejected decades ago?

I’m sad today. I don’t fully know why, but I think it might in part be the tighter clothes I’m wearing and that number on the scale that keeps creeping up. The consequences of a multitude of mindless moments medicating feelings I didn’t really even stop to feel.

I need to stop more, and I need to feel the feelings, whatever they are. Choosing to thoughtlessly feel good for a moment is numbing me to what I really feel. It is hard to sit in your feelings when you don’t even fully know what they are, even harder when I have trained my brain to check out instead.

This right here is step one in staying mindful. I’m acknowledging this sadness. I’m considering how I got here and reflecting on how to explore my feelings even when they are only that breeze. I want to pause more and focus on how I’m really feeling in the moment, letting myself feel those things. Pleasure isn’t the only good feeling. It is good to feel nervous, hopeful, cautious, and excited, with a bit of fear mixed in.

On the wall in my office, I have written: “I can do hard things. I have done hard things. Hard things are not going to stop me.” My head and heart are full of dreams. I keep letting the feelings that stir up when I consider the risks connected to pursing those keep me from moving on them.

Maybe being strong and courageous means facing my feelings, expressing them, analyzing them, and praying about them. When I escape into the easy feeling, I am really just giving into fear, and the consequences are just as hard in the end as facing the feeling I was trying to avoid.

The nice thing about processing all this is that I am already less sad now. I share this openly so that if you see yourself in my experience at all, may you feel encouraged to face your feelings too.