I never liked the quiet before
Silence. It’s a weird thing. I always hated silence, always needed background noise no matter what I was doing. For some reason if things were too quiet it scared me. If I was sitting in a room with someone and they weren’t talking, I would talk excessively just to fill the void. I would constantly be thinking, “Why aren’t they talking? What are they thinking about? Are they mad at me?” The one exception to that is my dad, but that’s a story for another day.
This morning as I was laying on my couch in the early hours of the day, I was just listening to the sounds outside. My neighborhood is rarely quiet but in the morning it’s so still you can actually hear birds outside. It’s quiet for Washington Heights standards. And I started thinking how much I’ve changed over the last year. I remember during the first few days of quarantine last March, I texted a friend who lives on the other side of the neighborhood and said, “It’s so quiet!” It was weird to not hear music and talking and just general noise outside. It was creepy. I found myself, in turn, reluctant to play music too loud in my own apartment. It seemed like the whole neighborhood was in mourning and I wanted to respect that.
The result of this was that as days turned into weeks turned into months and eventually led to a full year (plus!) I became so comfortable with quiet within my own space that there are days where I don’t turn on the TV until late at night or never play a single note of music. I breathe in the quiet and allow myself to actually be alone with my thoughts.
I’m going to repeat that last part…
I allow myself to be alone with my thoughts.
That’s the important part of this realization. The reason I was always so scared of quiet is because I couldn’t bare to know what thoughts would fly through my head. I was scared of myself and being alone with my thoughts gave me nowhere to hide. Now we’re 14 months in and, aside from a few instances here and there, I’ve basically been alone with those thoughts the whole time. I’ve allowed myself to sit and explore them for the first time in my life. It’s not always a good thing and that can lead to me freaking out or overly obsessing over something, but what’s happened has been a kind of beautiful thing.
A year ago I would obsess and spin for days (sometimes weeks) over a single thing. Maybe I had said something stupid or texted the wrong person. I would relive something I had said months previously and beat myself up about it. Literally anything… and it was making me crazy. I couldn’t stop the obsessing because I only had myself as company and no distractions. My sleep suffered because I simply couldn’t turn my brain off. I drove my friends crazy with rambling texts that were completely incoherent. But here’s the thing: the longer I was with myself and those thoughts, the easier it became to pull myself out of a spin. I learned that being scared of my thoughts only made the spin cycle worse.
The last 2 months have given me more clarity and self-awareness than I’ve ever had in my life. Do I still have those moments where everything seems hopeless? Yes because I’m human. But getting comfortable with silence in order to stop hiding from myself is something that is difficult to put into words. When you’ve been running from yourself for 20+ years, finding enough peace in the silence so that you can finally stop running is the biggest relief.
It’s difficult not to obsess over things we can’t change, right? That’s basically the basis of the serenity prayer. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” If there’s something I can’t fix, whether it’s something tangible happening right now or something that happened in the past, it’s easy for me to obsess and think about ways to make it better even though that’s impossible. However, finding peace within my thoughts and comfort in the silence of every day life has given me the space to explore all of it so that when I do obsess (which still happens, yes), it’s not all-consuming.
I never liked the quiet before because I would be consumed by those thoughts and they would become me, but I’m not scared of them anymore. I’m not scared of myself anymore and that’s the best thing of all.
- Danielle
