There are these moments now where the only thing I want is to close my eyes and sit still. No music. No movement. No noise. Just that quiet hum inside when everything external finally steps aside. I turn on the TV, maybe out of habit, maybe to check if I’m still the same. A few minutes pass. I turn it off. It doesn’t feel good. Or bad. Just... less.
Music is next. A few tracks in, and I’m already reaching for silence like it’s sparkling water.
Maybe I go out for dinner. The lure of bar seating, music that moves me, the smell of something grilled. A good conversation. A look that stays just long enough to mean something from across the room. Enough to make me feel. That’s what I’m walking past—not just food, not just noise, but the hope of feeling something. I don’t go in. I keep walking. Not because I’m better than it, but because I know it’s not what I need. Not right now.
It’s not detachment from the world. I still feel everything. Deeply. It’s detachment from anything that isn’t intentional.
For so long, distraction was the only medicine I knew. Background noise, full schedules, loud dinners, bottles of wine, late nights, screens always on. I used to think noise meant I was alive. Turns out, it just meant I wasn’t listening. Now I can’t do any of it without feeling like I’m betraying something in me.
That doesn’t make me pure. Or healed. Or wise. Just awake enough to feel something shift—and not look away.
I always imagined solitude as absence. An emptiness. Something you settle for when there’s no one left to call. But this—this is different. It’s not lonely. It’s full. It has weight. It has taste.
There’s something beautiful, and a little terrifying, about realizing you no longer want the things that used to numb you. Casual scrolling. Filler conversations. Walking into a restaurant just because it's on some list. If I eat out now, it’s because I want to taste something real, made by people I want to know by name. If I talk, it’s because I have something to say. And if I don’t, I won’t pretend.
It’s not about hiding from the noise. The world is still out there. I can see it clearly now. Loud. Gorgeous. Full of people making terrible decisions for amazing reasons. I haven’t forgotten that. I don’t want to.
Sometimes I let myself fall back into it. No shame. No story. As juice drips through my fingers and I lick them clean, I'm reminded of what terrible decisions taste like—not sweet, not bitter, just real.
But the silence—this space I’ve found—it’s not an escape. It’s recovery. It’s how I gather myself before diving back in. Like that moment before a first kiss. Quiet. Tense. Sacred.
It’s strange to say, but the best part of my last weeks wasn’t a thing I did. I didn’t chase. I didn’t escape. I let the silence sink in.
I sat there. Eyes closed. Breathing. No need for anything to be different.
And that, somehow, felt like a win.
Which tells me how long I’ve been losing.