To be Still

Growing up the way I did, with a single mother who had little to no help, shaped me to be a person who believes routines and comfortability are unmanageable. Something will always come up. Something will always go wrong. As a young adult, that belief was proven to me time and time again. 

While my mind was overtaken by homelessness, caretaking and trying to simply survive; I became complacent with the inconsistencies of struggle. My life lacked stillness and routine and at some point, I started making it harder on myself because I was so used to living dysfunctionally. For years, it’s made sense to me to have no savings, to make no plans for the future and to simply survive. For years, I’ve believed that’s the best I can do.

To me, stillness is a quiet so loud I have to turn on a song I don’t even like that much to evade it. It’s the feeling of having to pee really bad in the last hour of a 5 hour road trip and refusing to stop. It’s inescapable. It’s overwhelming and frigid. It crawls all over my skin like ants searching for a crumb on the kitchen counter.

My mind whispers to me that I don’t deserve to come home and relax. I deserve to be constantly anxious and numb at the same time. The trauma has tangled my adult experience into endless knots of what’s the use and who cares.

My mind has been so clouded with trauma and twisted self preservation for so long that I had no idea who I was outside of that. I’ve had no idea what I wanted, other than to survive. I’ve had no idea what I liked or why I liked it. I’ve tried on different personalities and dipped my toes in different hobbies, in attempts to avoid being still and actually getting to know myself. 

Often, rest doesn’t feel like rest. My existence has been overwhelmed by tragedy– blackening the beauty of stillness and quiet and monotony. I’ve been filling my time with people I hardly like and scrolling for hours on social media apps to avoid the feeling of being alone with my thoughts. For the first year of living on my own, I paid my bills late and kept my fridge empty for the chaos of it all. For years I’ve stayed up until almost 6 a.m. no matter what obligation I had the next day. 

When my therapist first brought up the concept of being uncomfortable with comfortability, it began to fall into place for me. After that, I would genuinely try to be still. I would come home to a quiet home and decline invites because I “wanted to stay home and crochet”. I would fully commit myself to doing functional things like paying my bills when I was supposed to and grocery shopping every week. But after a while, I would mess it up somehow. I always found some reason to stay up until sunrise or overspend on unnecessary items so I couldn’t afford to pay my bills on time.

I think it’s darker than simply being uncomfortable with comfortability. What if I start to go to bed at 11 p.m. and I pay my bills on time all the time and it feels good? And I get to do that for the rest of my life? Bullshit. I’ve convinced myself that being comfortable is impossible for me. I’m constantly waiting for the other foot to drop. Living doesn’t just get easier. It feels good for a while and then things fall apart again. 

Until recently, I felt like all I was meant to be was a tragic story. The story of my mother and me played on my mind in an everlasting loop. And I let that story become who I was. I didn’t feel safe in my own home. I didn’t feel safe being comfortable because I was convinced that security would be taken from me. I spent a lot of energy making my life difficult and giving myself countless distractions as some sick act of control. 

I would rather ruin things for myself than have everything taken from me again. That way there’s no surprises. There’s no emotional damage because I am in control of my own destruction. And until recently, I didn’t realize keeping myself in that headspace was damaging my mind anyway. Actually, I don’t think I realized I was self-destructing in that way in the first place. It just felt right. To shut down at the sight of a utility bill. To order DoorDash every night even though I’m fully aware I can’t afford it. It gave my mind something to worry about at all times of the day, so that being still was impossible for me. 

Ironically, I also have an obsession with perfection. I dedicate myself to something for an hour, a day, a week, a month and if it doesn’t yield the results I want, I give it up. So I’ve been trying to make my existence perfect. I’ve been giving myself a week or two at a time to fully commit to the “healed human being” bit, and when I don’t feel better, I go right back to self sabotaging. 

I’m starting to realize stillness doesn’t work that way. The human experience does not work that way. Being comfortable isn’t something I can perfect. It’s a state I must choose to be in. I have to choose to and be comfortable with existing as I am, in this moment– instead of keeping myself on the edge of my seat and imagining the worst possible outcomes of every situation. Instead of being convinced that things will always be bad for me, I have to make my life as easy as I can. Because I deserve that. I’ve earned that and I’m so grateful to finally have the ability to give myself the life I wanted when I was young and struggling.  

I’ve begun to embrace the stillness. I’ve embraced the monotony of adulthood– of coming home to a stocked fridge and paying my bills on time. Without all the worry and self-destruction, my mind has been clear enough to make sense of who I am. And it doesn’t come naturally to someone like me. Getting to know myself outside of the pain and suffering has never felt attainable. 

At times, it’s really hard and uncomfortable because, if you haven’t been able to tell; sometimes I’m not all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes I’m angry and petty and unfocused and ridiculous. But sometimes, I’m funny (actually, pretty much all the time) and optimistic and perceptive and imaginative. And I think that’s part of the point, being familiar with the good and not-so-good parts of myself. 

My idea of stillness is still loosely based in theory and messily bound with the practice of being comfortable. It’s deeply psychological and exhausting for me, and I’m not always sure if I’m getting it right. And I’m positive I don’t completely understand it. But in the process of trying to figure it out, I have gotten to know myself better and come to love myself deeper than I ever would have imagined. And even with all my half assed hobbies and attempts to perfect the art of comfortability, I don’t think anything has brought me closer to myself than just being still.