When healing feels like suffocation, and hope finds you anyway.

Do you know where weakness lies? In the shadow of the depths of your pain.
Do you know where strength is found? In the light when you come up for air.

That’s not to say there is weakness in suffering—but for strength to be recognized you have to reach for the surface. Once you escape the suffocation of pain, you can reflect on the strength it took to get there.

What’s not talked about enough though, is how easy it is to stay in the depths. That somehow there is comfort in the despair.

While reflecting on some of my old writing, I found a snippet from a piece I called Cozy Sadness. At the time, I was trying to untangle what I had been taught about hope from what I actually believed. I didn’t have answers… I just knew how it felt to be buried.

From a 2022 journal entry titled “Cozy Sadness”:

This sadness can be consuming. And yet, even as I try to understand it, I’m met with a thick feeling of guilt. I don’t deserve to be sad. I have a healthy beautiful life. But I am covered in a darkness that I’m not sure how to get out of. Who am I kidding, I know how to get out, but part of me is comfortable in the sadness. It’s peaceful in a way. The thought of crawling out seems so daunting. The heaviness is like a warm blanket covering me from the brisk, cold day. So why not just stay where it’s familiar and warm? Because if I stay, I might suffocate from the lack of air that I know I need. I might be swallowed by the heaviness, sinking deeper and deeper until I can’t dig myself out anymore. So where does that leave me? Stuck, suffocating myself under a blanket that I know how to get out of. Just take the blanket off. Just pull it from over your head. One swift movement and you get to breathe. Take it off and breathe. It sounds so simple. But the loneliness of it pulls the blanket tighter around me. No one would care if I stayed here forever. No one reaches out. No one checks in. If I get out, I will be alone. I will be cold, blind, and alone. Is it worth it to be able to breathe? The strange thing is how I can be trapped in this suffocation tent and still find happiness. It’s like, the blanket has windows. Small windows that I can experience the air from outside. Tender moments from my husband or kids allow me to take in a quick gasp of fresh air. But is that all the air I get?

The idea of healing can feel too risky.

When you’re stuck under the blanket, everyone else continues to move around you. It seems like you’re refusing to move or maybe you don’t look like you’re suffering anymore because you’ve accepted the pain and learned how to breathe through the suffocation, but the result is, you become an afterthought. The pain is harder to see so it gets missed.

Maybe there isn’t hope in getting out of the blanket. When you’re that comfortable, it becomes home. But where there is hope, is in the knowledge that you are not alone. Even if it feels like you are. Even when you put your words into the void with hopes of an echo and there is one, you’re still not alone.

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The thing I’ve come to realize about healing is that it’s not about removing the blanket completely, it’s about making it a little lighter. It’s about creating more and more windows to let the air in. To give room to breathe. And if you’re open to it there is someone who can bring air in when you can’t find it yourself. For me, that is Jesus. He can meet you in the suffocation. He brings air with Him. He helps create windows. And if you’re not ready for that, He’ll just hold you.

I’ll be honest, sometimes the blanket still feels all too familiar. The blanket isn’t as heavy right now but I have been in the thick of it. In that suffocation and pain I have felt Jesus catch every tear and offer every breath when I had none.

I want to say this to you: however deep you are, you are not alone.

Others are buried in their pain too, and I believe Jesus can find you, even when it feels like you’ve been looked over by everyone else. He seeks the ones the world overlooks. He doesn’t rush us out but stays; not to keep us there, but to move with us, slowly, toward healing. Toward the air we so desperately need but don’t always long for.

Healing doesn’t always look like bursting into light. Sometimes it’s learning to live in the comfort of His presence, even before the blanket is gone.

So, when it feels like you’re too weak, when there’s no strength or hope to be found (whether you share my belief that Jesus can be that hope, or you’re still searching for it on your own) just know: that is not weakness.

Your strength is still there. You just might not see or feel it until you find a way to breathe, even in suffocation.

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So even when your pain is no longer obvious to the world, even when you’re overlooked, dismissed, or forgotten by others—you are not forgotten by Him.

As an afterthought, you are still sought after.