Sometimes, nothing screams like stillness

I used to live in movement. Travel, adventure, new places, new ideas. Always something shifting, always something ahead. It still frustrates me when people call it escapism. Because most of the time, it wasn’t about running. It was about choosing life at its fullest volume. Everything felt more alive, more open, more in contact with something raw and immediate.

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But this phase looks different. I’m staying put. The kind of movement I once knew is almost nonexistent.

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Early thirties. Solo mom of a toddler. Less time for work, going out, meeting people. Starting over in a new city, in a completely new role. Choosing to stay, even though part of me still remembers how easy it is to leave when things get hard.

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I didn’t expect stillness to feel this loud.

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The fears that were always there. The loneliness that used to dissolve into people, places, direction. The parts of me I’d examined a hundred times in my head but never truly let reach my stomach.

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Now there is space. And space does not edit itself.

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More evenings at home alone than out in the world. More quiet than momentum. A life that doesn’t reset when something feels uncomfortable. Turns out I find that deeply annoying and unsettling.

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I watch people move between freedom and commitment and I don’t quite recognise myself in either anymore. Not in the young families, where there’s at least another adult in the house to tag in when you’ve hit your limit. Not in the carefree, kid-free singles in the city. And not quite in the co-parents either, who at least get to hand the whole thing over every other week and have some breathing room. Though I’m probably romanticising that a little.

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There is a kind of missing that coexists with a kind of knowing. Missing a partner, while also seeing clearly that even that wouldn’t arrange everything inside me into something simple or solved. No external shift replaces what becomes visible internally.

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I notice it more in my body now. In the slowness of my days. In the way silence no longer fills itself.

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What surprises me is not that these feelings exist. It’s how long they were outrun before they could fully arrive.

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Movement, people, work. It was all a way of staying in contact with life. And also a way of not meeting certain parts of it.

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Both are true.

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I chose this, in pieces. Becoming a mom. Settling in a city. Stopping the roaming. Each one a clear yes. It’s just that nobody shows you what all those yeses look like stacked together, or what comes with them that you didn’t order.

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Choosing to stay is not a concept. It’s a practice. Not immediately escaping what arises. Not outsourcing attention outward. Not reorganising the inside through the outside world.

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It’s not easy. It’s fucking hard. The kind that doesn’t announce itself, because nothing dramatic is happening. Just life as it is, without distraction.

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I write to organise my thoughts. I wasn’t sure if I’d share this. But isolation grows when things like this stay unnamed. It’s not rare. Just rarely spoken.

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So if you’re here too, somewhere between movement and stillness, belonging and not quite belonging, I hope there’s something in this that feels like company :)

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I used to think stillness was the absence of something. I’m starting to think it might be the beginning of something else. I don’t know what yet. But I’m here for it. Mostly. Sometimes 🙃