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When the noise goes quiet

Thirty years of negotiation, and then silence

Started 1 January 2025 · 18 replies · 185 hearts · read 3.8k times

RinManchester, UK · 1 January 2025
1.5 years ago

A question rather than an update: Thirty years of negotiation, and then silence

This is a difficult one to write and I have deleted it twice.

I have read a great deal about the physical side of this and almost nothing about the part I am actually struggling with.

What I want is company rather than an answer, and I have learned that this circle is one of the few places where asking for that is not strange.

I keep records precisely so that I do not have to estimate, and the record says thirty years, which is what the title says too.

No advice needed. Company would be welcome and anything else is a bonus.

62

MattNottingham, UK
#1

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.

8

BronteHaworth, UK
#2

Rin, I have been where you are and I would rather say so than stay quiet.

What surprised me most was how ordinary I felt. Not better exactly. Ordinary, in a way I had assumed was simply not available to me.

10me too 7

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#3

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.

13

BodhiByron Bay, AU
#4

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.

8

WinnieCarlisle, UK
#5

Bronte said something I want to sit with for a second.

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.

8

MaryamBirmingham, UK
#6

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.

11

SaraOslo, NO
#7

This is the honest version, and the honest version is harder to write.

11

AnnaAthens, GR
#8

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.

12

SorayaTehran, IR
#9

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

TinukeManchester, UK
#10

Reading Sara, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

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

OllyReading, UK
#11

What Anna described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

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.

12me too 5

ClemmieNorwich, UK
#12

Coming back two years on to say the quiet held, that the adjustment was real, and that I would not go back to how my head sounded before.

11

BronwenBarry, UK
#13

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

11

AmmiKarachi, PK
#14

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

I keep a note from my first month about what it had been like before, because I could already feel the memory of it fading and I did not want to lose it.

9

TansyLudlow, UK
#15

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.

7

OsgarKillarney, IE
#16

Bronwen said something I want to sit with for a second.

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.

12

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#17

Holding a boundary kindly: this circle does not discuss food in the way the rest of the internet does. A couple of replies have edged that way and I am steering us back.

14

TavishIsle of Skye, UK
#18

I walked past a shop I had never once walked past in my adult life and stood outside it slightly stunned. That is my whole story about this.

12