Not everyone gets the quiet, and that is worth saying

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.

To the opening post rather than to the thread: Nadia, this is my version of it.

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.

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.

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.

Grateful you posted rather than kept it to yourself.

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.

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.

I would gently say that if the quiet has left you with a lot of unexpected feeling, that is very common here and it is worth saying out loud.

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

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.

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

Picking up Salma’s point rather than starting a new 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.

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

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.

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.

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.