Tonight I dealt with a difficult feeling. The source and contents of the feeling are not important, but the quality of the feeling and what I did in response to it are.

I’m talking about the kind of feeling that eats away at your insides. The kind of burning, seeping, anxious despair that makes any happiness or stability you might have felt ever in your life seem like an utter lie, an impossible construction. The kind of feeling that hollows you out, curb stomps you, and spits in your face for good measure.

When faced with this sort of feeling in the past, I have done one of several things. Perhaps I would engage in a marathon bout of mindless eating, choosing only the sweetest tastes in a misguided attempt to counteract the acrid burn I felt inside. Or, if Little Debbie was inaccessible, I might engage in some run-of-the-mill self-mutilating behaviors–nothing too dramatic, mind you, because I am both a hedonist and a coward. I would probably partake of the Special Friends: alcohol and your basic smokables, guaranteed to stuff down any bad feeling (until they simply don’t, and you’re just fucked up and sad, with a hacking cough to boot). Maybe I would have engaged in one of the the so-called normal distractions: watching movies or television, which I’m not too good at; reading, which I am; mindless internet browsing, which I believe anyone can do. Shopping, which provides relief for many, never worked for me; it simply amplifies any feeling I might already have of wanting to shoot myself in the head.

Perhaps I would have done some journaling, that frenzied scribbling of one’s thoughts in a little notebook for no one else to read. As an introvert possessed by the delusion that my thoughts and experiences are somehow special and worth recording, I’ve done plenty of this. As a result, I have an awful lot of notebooks full of horrible, self-loathing, despair-laden thoughts. And not a lot of relief.

Finally, there is the depressive’s standby, the classic move I could always turn to when there was no other palliative around, or I was just so hollowed out that I didn’t even have the energy to turn on the television: find somewhere dark and lonely, curl up in a ball, and cry. (In an extension of this move available only to the very lucky/soporific, one can transition from weeping into the formless void of sleep.)

In my experience, these strategies have several major flaws. First, they fail to address the maddening fact that an emotion which has arisen out of the void is now wielding tremendous negative power over you. Second, the feeling is still there, though it might be (temporarily) duller. And third, the strategies themselves are entirely capable of heaping additional trouble on top of an already dicey situation.

Tonight, with my Very Heavy Feeling sprung up out of nowhere and ravenously eating away at my insides, I did none of these things. What is even more remarkable is that I didn’t even pause to consider, struggle with, and finally reject any of them as a course of action. I simply sat down, crossed my legs, set my timer for 30 minutes, and attempted to focus all of my attention at the tip of my nose, where I can feel my breath entering and leaving my body.

I say “attempted,” because it was indeed a struggle. My mind told me fantastic stories in very convincing words. It showed me a hundred images, some of them pretty, some not so much. My mind also tried to thrash about in the Very Heavy Feeling in my solar plexus, commenting on its weight and its painfulness, and insisting that it signified my failure as a human being. Through each of these distractions, I pulled my attention back to the tip of my nose, to the quiet experience of my breathing.

And when the timer went off, and thirty minutes had elapsed, the Very Heavy Feeling was gone. Melted. Irrelevant. It had become just one tiny little bit of the masquerade, which I simply no longer had to pay any mind.