I kept refreshing the shipping status on a package like it might heal something in me. Kept checking my phone in case a text arrived that would unclench my chest. Kept watching the news, thinking maybe this time they’d say something that made it all feel less uncertain.
None of it ever worked. But I kept trying. Like maybe control was just a stronger version of vigilance.
It’s weird how we convince ourselves that our lives are on pause until the outside world agrees to calm down. That peace will arrive with better timing, better conditions, better people. We end up putting our joy on layaway. Hanging it on someone showing up, something being fixed, some wave passing.
I told myself I’d feel lighter when the money looked better. When the test results came back. When the conversation happened. When the to-do list got smaller. When the world decided to be less on fire.
It never really did. And even when things settled for a second, my nervous system didn’t know how to cash in. Because I hadn’t taught it how. I’d only trained it to grip tighter.
Turns out, you can’t outsource your calm.
You either learn to make peace in the chaos, or you wait forever.
It wasn’t a grand breakthrough. It came slowly. In the middle of unpaid bills, half-finished conversations, missed calls, news cycles that wouldn’t quit. The kind of clarity that sneaks in while you’re washing dishes or sitting in traffic. The kind that says: this is wasting you.
So I stopped waiting.
I stopped making my well-being conditional on whether people behaved, whether outcomes came through, whether the world cooperated. I pulled all that hope back and pointed it at things I could actually do something about.
Like whether I was drinking enough water. Like whether I closed my laptop at a sane hour. Like whether I believed every thought that walked through my head.
That’s not sexy advice. There’s no glitter in it. But it works.
I started noticing the quiet wins: the way I said no without guilt. The way I stopped spiraling when someone was cold to me. The way I could put my phone down without it feeling like withdrawal. It wasn’t that the storm ended. I just stopped thinking it owed me anything.
Some days, I still forget. I still want the relief to come from the outside. But then I remember: that kind of waiting costs too much.
There’s a lot I’ll never be able to fix. But I can control how I speak to myself in the middle of the mess. I can choose what I put my energy into. I can stop chasing stillness in places that were never built to hold it.
Let the world be loud. It doesn’t mean you have to be.
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