The vital necessity of confronting and learning from the past, which is now who we are and who we have become in Daydreaming on the Porch

You have been wounded in many ways. The more you open yourself to being healed, the more you will discover how deep your wounds are. . . . The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you can analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down to your heart. Then you can live through them and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.


Henri Nouwen

I’ve learned over many years, that I can’t expel the terrible experiences and memories from the past and tuck them all neatly away in some mental clothes drawer, forgetting about those people, events and feelings that have molded me into the person I am today. But I can confront, both in my head and in my heart, the issues I am dealing with now, and those from the past, difficult as they have been. Doing so has made me a stronger, wiser, and more compassionate person than I would have been otherwise. My memories and experiences — my past — are who I am today. How could it be possible for me to keep the past bottled up.

Sometimes I wish it was possible to shove thoughts and memories of severe mental injuries out of my mind. There is no physical pain, but there is still mental pain and anguish and regrets. There are often flashbacks to the triggering events that led to my two episodes of major depression. Those two events forever altered my life.

I’ve written about those times, and that process of confronting the past has been deeply therapeutic, even cathartic at times. I’ll probably write again about depression and what it’s like. I intimately know about these things, and I am here to write about them now and in the future. I would never undergo any therapy that erased those memories, or take any drug that would do that because then I would be losing myself.

I explore the past, traumatic experiences and depression in part to let anyone who is reading know there is hope. Each and every day when we get up and are still in possession of the gift of life, that alone is a form of redemption.

I’m still working on myself — a survivor all these years later, and I will be learning from those bad times until the end. As with so many of the events in life that shake you to your core, recovery, then self-knowledge, are lifelong processes. But I am certain I never would have attained the levels of understanding and spiritual progress I have reached without suffering first.

Last updated October 21, 2023