My relationship with cooking changed completely

The quiet was the thing I was least prepared for. I had spent thirty years with a background hum and had no idea it was not how everybody's head sounded.

Somebody in this circle described it as the volume going down rather than the station changing, and that was the most accurate description I have read.

I noticed it first in the supermarket, of all places, standing in an aisle that had always been difficult and finding it was simply an aisle.

What I found is that habits built around the noise outlasted the noise. I was still doing things for a reason that no longer applied, months later.

The relief was enormous and the adjustment was real, and I think people talk about the first and not the second.

Sitting with you on this one.

I had never described it to anybody before this circle because I had assumed it was universal. Finding out it was not was a strange afternoon.

What I would tell somebody experiencing this for the first time is that whatever it brings up is allowed, including the things that do not look like gratitude.

The thing that helped was not treating the quiet as the point. It was one change among several and building everything around it made it fragile.

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.