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When the noise goes quiet

The quiet came back loud and I was not ready

Started 18 October 2024 · 20 replies · 220 hearts · read 4.6k times

BronteHaworth, UK · 18 October 2024
1.8 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: The quiet came back loud and I was not ready Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

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

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 would find useful is knowing whether anybody else has felt this way about it, because from inside my own head it seems like an unreasonable reaction.

Thanks. Saying it here first has made the idea of saying it to somebody else considerably less impossible.

73

NualaArmagh, NI
#1

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.

5

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#2

I want to name what it costs to meet something frightening calmly rather than rushing at it. It takes practice, this circle has it, and none of us had it at the start.

23

Ozzy GWalsall, UK
#3

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

9me too 7

BodhiByron Bay, AU
#4

Ozzy G, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

My version was gradual rather than sudden. Nothing dramatic, just a slow noticing over about two months that something had stopped.

11

CallaWellington, NZ
#5

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

SinéadCork, IE
#6

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

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.

14

TansyLudlow, UK
#7

Gently disagreeing with Sinéad, or rather adding the other half of it.

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.

8

PosyChichester, UK
#8

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.

10me too 2

LuPreston, UK
#9

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

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.

13

MaeveSligo, IE
#10

Recognition rather than advice, if that is any use at all.

8me too 7

TheaBergen, NO
#11

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

Mine returned partially when I reduced, which my prescriber had told me might happen, and knowing in advance made it much less alarming.

11

SaraOslo, NO
#12

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.

9

OllyReading, UK
#13

The bit in the middle is the bit I needed to read.

10me too 7

LenaMunich, DE
#14

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

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.

7

SorayaTehran, IR
#15

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.

12

FionnualaDundalk, IE
#16

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

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.

10me too 2

NyreeChristchurch, NZ
#17

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.

14

HannahSheffield, UK
#18

Somebody asked me whether I miss it, which sounds like an absurd question and is not. There was a familiarity to it that I have had to let go of.

10

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#19

Closing note: this stays linked from the circle landing. If you have arrived late and want to say something, there is no such thing as too late here.

15me too 4

MapleToronto, CA
#20

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

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.

11