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When the noise goes quiet

I miss looking forward to dinner

Started 20 August 2025 · 16 replies · 147 hearts · read 1.4k times

BrammyBelfast, NI · 20 August 2025
11 months ago

I miss looking forward to dinner Writing it down partly to work out what I actually think.

Not asking anyone to fix this. Mostly saying it out loud somewhere it will be read kindly.

I would like to hear from people who found this hard rather than from people who did not, which I know is an odd thing to ask for.

I have spent a long time managing everybody else's feelings about this and I have not looked at my own, and that is what this post is.

I have been sitting on this for a month and it has not got smaller, which I gather is how these things usually go.

Thank you for reading. I am not expecting anybody to have an answer and I feel better for having written it.

49

Ozzy GWalsall, UK
#1

Mine came back for a fortnight during a very stressful autumn and then went again, and I have learned not to read too much into a bad fortnight.

7

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#2

Facilitator note: if any of this has landed close to home while you were reading, our support resources page lists the kinds of service worth finding. No obligation and no drama.

20

AmmiKarachi, PK
#3

Mine did not go entirely quiet, it went quieter, and I want to say that because the total-silence accounts made me feel like something had not worked.

8

MaeveSligo, IE
#4

Coming back to what Ozzy G wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

What nobody told me is that it comes back sometimes, in patches, and that this is ordinary rather than a sign anything has stopped working.

9me too 7

BramGhent, BE
#5

The hardest conversation I had was explaining to somebody who has never had it what it was like to have it. There is no good analogy.

6

NadiaCairo, EG
#6

Something I did not expect: I was less irritable within a fortnight, and I now think a good deal of my irritability had been the constant background negotiation.

4

TildaCambridge, UK
#7

Nadia — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

What helped was writing down what the noise had actually been, while I could still remember it clearly. Six months later the memory of it had gone soft.

9me too 2

SaoirseKilkenny, IE
#8

Saying it out loud helps other people say it too. Thank you.

12

SalmaManchester, UK
#9

I have found the quiet made some things harder rather than easier. Boredom, mainly, which I had apparently not experienced in decades.

8me too 9

IzzyWatford, UK
#10

Saoirse — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

The thing I would say is that this is worth talking about in therapy if you have access to it. Mine opened up a great deal that I had not connected to it.

7

BronwenBarry, UK
#11

Mine went quiet within about ten days and I did not trust it for months. I kept waiting for it to come back and prove the whole thing had been my imagination.

12

SaraOslo, NO
#12

The space it left was uncomfortable at first. I had a great deal of attention suddenly free and no idea what to do with it.

8

WinnieCarlisle, UK
#13

Picking up Sara’s point rather than starting a new one.

What was underneath the noise turned out to be the actual subject. Once it stopped I had to look at what it had been covering, and that took a year.

10

SorayaTehran, IR
#14

I cried the first week. Not from relief exactly. From something closer to grief for how much effort I had been spending without knowing it.

6

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#15

Stepping in to say that stepping back from this circle for a while is always allowed and nobody will ask where you went.

12

RinManchester, UK
#16

I did not realise how much of my planning had been about this until it stopped. Entire structures in my week turned out to exist for a reason that had gone.

9