Ann Simard Writes Candidly About Numbing Pain and Learning to Feel Again

Addiction is not treated as an isolated chapter in Ann Simard Wear Your Waders: From Panic to Peace. It appears as part of a much larger emotional story. Simard connects alcohol and drug use to fear, shame, abuse, self-blame, relationships, and the need to escape feelings she did not yet know how to face.

That framing matters.

Her memoir does not present substance use as glamorous rebellion, even when some memories take place in exciting settings or around unusual people. Nor does she reduce it to a simple moral failure. She describes drugs and alcohol as ways she tried to bury pain.

For a while, numbing felt easier than understanding.

Pain Does Not Disappear Because Feeling Does

During her Navy years, Simard drank heavily and used marijuana. She describes periods of blackout drinking and mornings when she did not know how she had returned home.

Later, life in California expanded her drug use. Marijuana remained part of the picture, while cocaine and methamphetamine entered her life through Denis. What could look like a party from the outside existed alongside unstable relationships, financial pressure, old trauma, and a deeply damaged sense of worth.

The substances changed how she felt temporarily.

They did not change what she believed about herself.

That distinction runs through the memoir. Numbing can interrupt awareness, but it cannot rewrite the source of pain.

When the effect ends, the emotional story is still waiting.

Why Numbing Can Feel Like Relief

Simard had learned from childhood to suppress emotion.

Fear could not always be expressed safely. Anger had consequences. Sadness did not reliably bring comfort. Speaking openly about abuse felt impossible.

If feelings have long been associated with danger, avoiding them can feel practical.

Substances offered one method.

Constant movement offered another.

Relationships could become another.

Even work and helping people can sometimes keep attention directed outward.

Wear Your Waders gradually reveals that recovery requires a different skill: staying present long enough to feel what has been avoided.

That is much harder than simply staying busy.

Counseling Changes the Direction

Jennifer Moore, Simard’s counselor, becomes one of the most important people in her healing story.

Simard credits counseling with helping her understand that what happened to her as a child was not her fault. She learns to like, love, and accept herself more fully.

Within Simard’s own spiritual understanding, that work also creates more room for Jesus in her life.

The change is not described only in emotional language. Simard says her desire for marijuana, alcohol, methamphetamine, and cocaine disappeared. She no longer felt the same need to bury her pain.

That does not mean difficult feelings disappeared.

She still experiences anger.

She still becomes frustrated.

She still cries.

She can still be triggered.

The difference is that she increasingly allows herself to experience those emotions instead of automatically trying to erase them.

Sobriety and Peace Are Not Identical

One of the most useful ideas in the closing chapters is Simard’s distinction between sobriety and peace.

She values being substance-free, but she does not treat abstinence as the entire destination. For her, genuine happiness also requires forgiveness, self-acceptance, boundaries, love, and learning not to internalize everything outside her control.

That is a broader definition of healing.

A person can stop using a substance and still live in fear.

A person can be sober and still hate themselves.

A person can avoid old behaviors while remaining emotionally controlled by old wounds.

Simard wants something deeper.

She wants peace.

Feeling Again Is Part of Freedom

Wear Your Waders never turns healing into a polished performance.

Near the end, Simard recounts becoming overwhelmed by a workplace trigger and contacting behavioral health for urgent help. The moment is important because it rejects the idea that needing support means progress has failed.

Sometimes feeling again means recognizing when the feelings are too heavy to carry alone.

That is still movement forward.

Ann Simard’s story offers a deeply personal view of what can happen when numbing stops being the primary survival strategy. Pain becomes something that can be named, discussed, prayed through, cried through, and sometimes taken to a professional for help.

The past is not erased.

The person carrying it changes.

For readers drawn to memoirs about addiction, faith, trauma, and emotional healing, Wear Your Waders offers a candid reminder that freedom is not merely the absence of a substance.

It is the growing ability to remain present in your own life without needing to disappear from yourself.

That change is neither instant nor perfectly linear in the memoir. Simard continues to encounter difficult people, old reactions, and emotional triggers, but she increasingly chooses tools that move her toward clarity rather than avoidance, including counseling, prayer, reflection, boundaries, and honest self-examination.