For so long, my body only new how to live on high alert. Always ready for the next fire to put, the next problem to solve, the next hoop to jump through.
So when I chose to leave the chaos behind, I didn’t know what to do. The silence felt foreign. I was uncomfortable with the space.
I caught myself craving the noise again; the busyness, the fixing, the proving because it felt familiar. It was what my system new as safety.
No one tells you that when you finally step away from the chaos, you feel lost.
You imagine peace. Spacious mornings. The exhale you’ve been craving but what often arrives first isn’t peace, it’s disorientation.
When you’ve spent years navigating by other people’s expectations, the stillness of your own truth can feel deafening. The noise stops, and suddenly you realize how much of your identity was built inside that noise.
The structure. The striving. The constant “next thing.” You thought you wanted freedom, and you do, but what no one tells you is that freedom has its own kind of ache.
Because when the doing fades, you meet yourself and that self might not be who you thought she’d be.
You might miss the version of you who was always busy, because at least she knew what to do. You might grieve the rhythm of your old life, even if it was unsustainable, because it made you feel useful, needed, sure.
But here’s the quiet truth I’ve learned:
The lost feeling isn’t wrong; it’s the doorway.
It means your nervous system is recalibrating to a new normal, one not powered by chaos, but by choice.
It means you’re remembering how to hear your own voice again, beneath the hum of everyone else’s.
It means you’ve stepped out of the storm and into the sacred space where clarity can finally find you.
So if you feel unmoored right now, if you’re standing in the in-between wondering who you are without the chaos, take heart. You’re not lost. You’re reorienting and that’s what awakening often feels like.
Let the stillness undo you a little. Let the silence speak.
Your next chapter doesn’t begin with doing. It begins with reclaiming.
Photo by Dee Starrs on Unsplash