If you or anyone you know has taken the long, winding, and often lonely road to healing, you naturally understand the difficulty of the journey.
While everyone’s experience is different, the theme is often the same. You learn to be quiet. I’m not talking about becoming a monk who takes a vow of silence; rather the deliberate and calculated focus of reducing the noise and distractions of your own mind.
Personal pain is loud. It sometimes screams out as addiction, disobedience, deception, or risk-taking. Other times it manifests as anxiety, panic attacks, depression, or a lack of self-confidence. I’ve never been an addict, nor would I classify myself as an illusive or deceptive person. However, my poison of choice is anxiety.
Whether those anxious periods were self-induced, circumstance, or burdened upon me by others, anxiety was my constant, annoying shadow. Like alcohol or drugs, chronic anxiety takes a toll on the body, mind, and spirit. But it also impacts self-confidence.
For years, I overworked, masked to give the impression that I was in control and my anxious nature was not. After decades of living on fumes and fables, my body and my soul united against me and took a stand to say, “Enough.” I realized that I was not in control: my anxiety was.
Following my ASD diagnosis, I made a definitive decision to learn and implement purposeful quietness. At first it was hard, even maddening. My mind, supercharged by my ADHD, fought my attempts to gain control.
It was an incident with my water heater that eventually sparked the change I needed. As I drove into the garage, after my morning hot yoga workout, I noticed a trickling trail of water flowing through the garage and over the egress to the driveway. My heart sank as I knew exactly what was happening. After many years of service, my water heater finally broke down. One side was crushed from pressure, caved in from the surmounting weight of the daily needs of a household. But rather than exploding onto the concrete floor of the garage, it slowly drained like a river on its way to the ocean.
I watched in horror yet fascinated at the natural reaction to stress. Then it hit me. Flow like water. There wasn’t a loud announcement or force of destruction, just a slow, quiet drain. The heater, like me, gave in to the pressure and just let it go, and I took mental notes.
In that moment, I made the decision to flow like water, letting go of all the sucky stuff that gave me anxiety and forgive all those who put me into an anxious state. I would let things come and go, flowing like water and riding the waves of change without fear. None of this happened overnight, nor was it a sudden miraculous insta-change. Like a newly planted tree, change and growth take time.
My life is much different today than it was five years ago when I discovered my heater’s river in the garage. I rush less and rest more, savoring the early morning hours each day by spending time outside on my patio with my two newly adopted shelter dogs as my long-time faithful canine companion, Lyncoln, sleeps after his breakfast. Reducing the noise reduces anxiety which leads to a more peaceful and prosperous existence. Ideas flow more freely. Inspiration appears when I need it the most, and my problem-solving skills have radically improved.
I gave up trying to control the narrative, the outcome, and at times, the execution of my daily tasks. Instead, I embrace the unknown, relying on my faith in the Universe and that Someone Bigger Than Me has everything well in hand, and all that is required of me is to listen quietly for the guidance to navigate the uncertainty.