…on silence

Or you know. Don’t.

The silence has always been so heavy.

When I lived alone, I would fill it with the TV – it was always on in the background. Music wouldn’t work – either it was something I didn’t like, or if I did like it, it was all-consuming. Maybe fine if you’re washing the dishes, but it’s hard to pay bills or finish a newsletter when you can’t stop belting along with Brittany that you have to work, bitch. Or crying as John reminds you that your body is a wonderland. Not conducive to preparing notes for a meeting in any way. Yes, sometimes classical or jazz (music without words is key) would work for a while – but only short term. Never for hours or days – never to really tick multiple things off the list.

So music didn’t really work. Random TV was the filler of choice when my husband and I moved in together too – it was just on in the background most of the time. News in the morning, talk shows in the afternoon, news in the evening, then sports. I don’t even really care about sports, but it was preferable to the alternative.

What was the alternative? The oppressive cycle of my own harsh thoughts and worries, mostly. I remember the silence of the house when I used to be in it alone as a kid – at first it was really scary, like if there was any alternate noise I wouldn’t hear the ‘bad guys’ trying to get in (anyone else grow up in the ‘80s and have “stranger danger” drilled into you like it was a Mastercraft set? So much easier to be afraid of a vague “bad dude out there” than your soccer coach or uncle, even though statistics show us that those are really the ones to keep your guard up for…). But after a while, the silence didn’t serve to keep me safe. Instead, it created too much space for the hamster wheel thinking – repeating that same trope again and again, getting nowhere with it.

When I look back, I realize I’ve probably always had some level of anxiety – it’s just hard to call it that in the moment, when it is just something that has always existed inside you. Doesn’t everyone walk around with an unnamed uneasiness inside their chest? Doesn’t everyone obsess constantly about one tiny perceived mistake and how it’s going to cost them something important socially? Doesn’t everyone get home from an event (like “a regular day ar school” or “a work day”) and play out the worst parts over and over again? It’s hard to know at 11 or 17 or 23 the things that are unique to you – especially when it’s mental health.

I’d like to say that once I finally moved in with that boyfriend, or found a great job, or got married, or had a kid that things changed. I’d love to be able to say that my hundreds (likely thousands) of hours of yoga and meditation training helped me tap into a place that I had been searching for as I tried to escape the silence. That I was able to go through the silence and face the parts of me that I have been trying to drown out all these years. But I can’t. Not really, anyway.

The silence is still heavy. It’s still something I run from, although not always as violently as I did before. Those early 20s, I had a lot to drown out, to run from, to hide from. I had a lot I really really didn’t want to face.

Those oppressive thoughts still come up in silence. I still hop on the hamster wheel when there is too much quiet, too much space. I fill it up differently (podcasts, downtempo, phone calls – one of the only benefits of all your best friends moving out of the city is that there is no shortage of people to call), and having a kid means she fills it up simply with her existence if she’s home. And yes, I do my best to seek it out at least once a day in meditation, although if I’m being fully transparent it’s much easier for me to enter an “empty mind” in a guided mediation or sound bath or even in a nature walk than attempting to just “sit in silence”.

I will say, however, that it doesn’t bother me the way that it used to. Most of the time, I can see it, and then course correct (and by course correct I mean put on a self-development talk). Not always – especially if I have something that has created perceived shame then forget it. I will run on that wheel until the sun rises and I fall exhausted into a pile of woodchips. But more often than not I can find something for my little rodent mind to fixate on other than the story I’m about to make up in my head about why I’m not good enough.

And for me that means managing the silence – and that actually feels pretty light.