Quiet Change

It happened slowly. It was so sudden. It was subtle. I can't believe how obvious it was. I cannot fathom the complexity of it's simplicity. But in it, I changed. I would say it was the change itself I recognized first, but it was the quiet. The quiet led me to the sonic chaos I now face. I always loved sound. Any sound. Anything to create noise in the dooming silence that surrounded my core. Music blaring. Drums beating. I hated the quiet; the stillness; being left alone with my own thoughts. I never would have believed the quiet would reveal its strength to me. Not me. Not a woman so full of loudness.

I'd used the volume of my noise as a drug since childhood, and the drug as a way to shout over the noise of my loudness. It sounds absurd. But that is what happens when you abuse a drug like distraction, it diverts you from the silence and makes you forget your emotions. But, today, today I remembered mine. They trampled very quietly back into my core and broke the loudness. My emotions told on me. They told myself that I could feel again. That I should feel again. And that is how I recognized it. In the quiet, for the first time in a decade, I sat, in silence, and just breathed in. I inhaled the feeling of pain. Then I exhaled the numbness I'd been addicted to for so long. I inhaled sadness. Then again I took in the deep, penetrating breathe of pain. And I sat. I just sat. In the silence I sat and never once tried to tune out the feelings with music or the TV or my own voice blabbing on about insignificant tales to hush the hurt warming my frost bitten interior. And that is when I knew I'd changed...when I welcomed the sweet sounds of nothingness.

I don't know how long I just sat there, feeling every emotion that had led me to this day. It wasn't long enough, however long it was, because with every breath came the same sensations of loss, deep sorrow, fear and pain. Then, as if in rhythm with my tearing heart, out came the chaotic cries of my brokenness, accompanied by cascading tears beating on my cheeks like drumsticks to a cymbal. My heart kicked as if it had been jump started. I curled into a ball, holding my chest with my shaking hands as my body rocked back and forth until I went limp, sending me dead-like to the floor. And I wished I had died. That my heart had exploded and I was lying there waiting to face the judgement of God instead of facing my new life. I didn't know how to do it. How to be this person. How to live as this new woman who allowed feelings to dwell within her and not fight against the ache she felt in every moment. I didn't know how to continue being still, in God's presence, and just feel the weight of emotion come upon me. I preferred the numbness. The noise. The deafening pitch that covered my cries.

But I had changed. I let silence in and peace overpowered the pollution. I turned on the voice of God and rested in his warmth as the bitter cold of my past was awakened. My emotions became a strength and diversion was no longer the substance I craved. And this, this is where it all began.