What I found in the Silence
The last two years have been full of big life changes, the kind you mark in photos and paperwork, with the most prominent being planting roots in new soil. But the most profound changes weren’t the big, visible ones. They didn’t happen in the milestone markers. They happened in the margins, in the quiet recalibrations between the chapters closed and the new chapters I’m still learning to write.
This season of change has been a slow unraveling. I’ve been distilling what matters, disentangling from old versions of myself, and learning (often the hard way) that healing isn’t always graceful. Sometimes it’s grief. Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s sitting in the middle of a life you asked for and whispering: I didn’t know it would feel like this.
I’ve scaled back, slowed my pace, carved out more presence, and filled life with deeper rhythms. I began creating the kind of life I had been dreaming of, but living that dream required something I hadn’t accounted for: the tender reckoning with the version of me who had kept me safe for so long.
I didn’t anticipate how much change, even when it’s good, is met with equal parts grief. In the heart of winter, that grief moved through me like a tide. I missed my friends. I missed my routine. I missed the version of me who felt confident and accomplished and known. So much of my worth had been quietly anchored to visibility, productivity, and praise, and without these things, I had to confront a haunting question: Who am I when I’m not achieving or being affirmed?
But this was what I wanted, to know the parts of myself that aren’t attached to achievement and success. So I leaned in. And that was my winter: raw, untethered, and aching. Slowly, as the seasons shifted, so did I.
I’ve started paying more attention to how I move through the world, not just externally, but internally. To the part of me that wants to create just to be in relationship with myself, not to be seen or celebrated. I even turned off my follower notifications on Instagram, a small gesture to myself and an experiment in showing up without attaching myself to the dopamine of likes or visibility.
It’s a small rebellion, but it matters. It’s an attempt to uncouple joy from performance. It’s part of the discipline of peace, of retraining my nervous system to seek satisfaction, not stimulation. It’s not easy, but it’s honest.
I’ve also begun the deeper, slower work of reinhabiting my body. Not just to optimize it or fix discomfort out of existence (though that instinct still lingers), but to listen. To honor its fatigue. To soften toward its aches. To appreciate it instead of rejecting it. To ask it what it needs, even when that answer is inconvenient. To stop treating discomfort as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a voice to be heard.
I’m realizing I feel most worthy when no one is watching. That’s something I’m holding close.
I don’t know what this next year will bring, but I hope it’s filled with more quiet, more awe, more depth, more uncharted moments of stillness, more closeness, more rest that doesn’t need to be earned, and more life that doesn’t require applause to feel real.
And maybe this is true for you too. Maybe the real work isn’t about speeding up, but about returning to yourself. To your body. To the quiet truths that live beneath the noise. When was the last time you felt most like yourself, even if no one else was watching?
