The Noise Was Drowning Me. So I Turned It All Off.
I was sitting at my kitchen table one morning, still weak from three months of COVID, staring at my phone like it held the answer to everything.
The apartment was silent. Not the peaceful kind. The hollow kind. The kind that happens when you’ve been alone too long and the walls start to feel like they’re watching you.
Outside, Ninth Street hummed with ordinary life. Cars passing. Someone’s dog barking. The coffee shop across the way opening its doors to the morning rush.
But inside, I was frozen.
My thumb hovered over the phone screen, the glass reflecting my face back at me in that sickly blue glow. I could see the shadows under my eyes. The thinness of my cheeks. The way my hair fell limply around my shoulders like it had given up trying.
And that’s when I heard it.
My own breath.
Quick. Shallow. Uneven.
The breath of a woman still bracing for impact that wasn’t coming.
My chest felt tight, like someone had cinched a rope around my ribs and pulled. My shoulders were up near my ears. My jaw was clenched so hard I could feel the ache radiating into my temples.
I set the phone down—not gently, but like it had burned me—and pressed both palms flat against the cool surface of the table.
The wood grain felt real under my fingers. Solid. Grounding.
And out of nowhere—not taught, not instructed, not part of any program I’d stumbled across in my desperate late-night scrolling—my body tried something different.
A rhythm that felt strangely ancient, like I had known it all along but had forgotten.
I closed my eyes.
Inhaled through my nose for four slow counts.
Held it—my lungs full, my chest expanded—for four more.
Exhaled through my mouth for six long, deliberate counts.
The first cycle wobbled. My breath caught halfway through like it didn’t trust the pattern yet.
The second cycle loosened something I’d been carrying for months. A knot somewhere deep in my belly began to soften.
By the third, something unlocked.
Not in my mind. In my body.
As if my nervous system—ragged and frayed from months of fighting just to stay upright—finally believed it was safe in that quiet kitchen.
My shoulders dropped.
My jaw unclenched.
The rope around my ribs loosened, just slightly.
And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn’t bracing anymore.
For months before this, I had been drowning.
Not in water. In noise.
After I made that crooked bed—the one that gave me my first spark of myself again after lying flat for three months—I thought I had reached the quietest point a woman could reach.
But I hadn’t.
Because even after that bed ritual began, even after I could finally stand long enough to heat soup without collapsing, the inside of my life stayed unbearably loud.
Not from sound.
From pressure. From expectation. From every voice except my own.
When the COVID fog finally began to lift—when the fever broke and the weakness started to recede and I could breathe without my lungs rattling—I realized my nervous system felt like it was running on broken wiring.
I woke each morning braced. Tight. Jittery.
As if life itself were something I needed to defend myself against.
The world outside my window looked normal. People walked their dogs. Went to work. Carried groceries. Laughed on street corners.
But inside my apartment, inside my body, I was still fighting.
And because I didn’t know how to steady myself yet—because no one teaches you how to land after you’ve been in freefall for months—I did what most women do when they are scared beyond reason.
I reached for noise.
The news before my feet hit the floor.
I’d wake up—groggy, disoriented, still not sure if I was safe—and grab my phone from the nightstand before I even sat up. The blue light would flood my face in the dim morning room, and I’d scroll.
Headlines screaming.
Case counts rising.
Experts contradicting each other.
The world on fire in a thousand different ways.
I told myself I was staying informed. Being responsible. Keeping up.
But really, I was just filling the space where my own voice used to be.
Then came the advice channels.
YouTube gurus promising clarity if I followed their seven steps.
Podcasts with spiritual teachers who sounded so certain, so calm, so unbothered by the chaos.
Instagram accounts full of soft lighting and hand-lettered affirmations that only made me feel like I was failing to feel inspired.
I consumed it all like a woman starving.
Not because it helped.
But because noise feels like company when you’re frightened.
Noise feels like control when everything is slipping.
Noise feels like progress when you’re too overwhelmed to move.
So I clung to it.
I let other people’s certainty fill the apartment. I let their voices drown out the quiet hum of my own intuition—the one that had carried me through every loss, every heartbreak, every collapse before this one.
I didn’t trust myself anymore.
So I trusted everyone else instead.
But that morning, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee I didn’t even want, something different happened.
My phone sat next to me on the table, glowing like a lifeline.
The news app had a red notification bubble. Seventeen unread articles. The world demanding my attention before I’d even brushed my teeth.
My hand reached for it without thinking. Pure habit. Pure fear.
My thumb hovered over the screen.
And my body stopped me.
That quick, shallow breath.
That tightness in my chest.
That sense of bracing—always bracing—for the next thing to go wrong.
I looked down at my hand, trembling slightly, and thought: What am I doing?
That’s when the breath came.
Not a thought. Not a decision.
Just my body—exhausted, depleted, but somehow still wiser than my frightened mind—offering a way through.
Four counts in.
Four counts held.
Six counts out.
I closed my eyes and followed it.
The kitchen fell away. The phone stopped glowing. The hum of the refrigerator faded into the background.
There was only breath.
In. Hold. Out.
In. Hold. Out.
By the third cycle, I could feel my heartbeat slowing. The frantic drumming in my chest easing into something steadier. Something almost calm.
And that’s when I heard what my nervous system had been trying to tell me for months:
The noise wasn’t helping me survive.
It was drowning me.
Drowning out my instincts.
Drowning out my clarity.
Drowning out the part of me that knew—had always known—how to find solid ground even when everything else was falling apart.
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