How I Learned to Sit With Silence

That’s what my therapist said in our first session, when I spent the whole hour talking about everything except what mattered. I remember the stillness in the room when she said that. It wasn’t confrontational. Just… true.

And for the first time in years, I didn’t know what to say back.

I grew up in a house where silence was something to be fought.

There was always background noise—TV, the radio, the hum of the refrigerator, even the distant yelling from upstairs that everyone pretended not to hear. My mother would fill every quiet moment with questions.

Did you eat? How was school? Who was that on the phone?

She wasn’t nosy. She was afraid of silence the way some people are afraid of the dark—because in the quiet, things come out. Real things. Things you can’t unsay.

As I got older, I inherited the same fear.

I talked too much in social settings, over-explained myself in texts, kept music playing in my headphones even when I wasn’t listening. I’d narrate my life out loud in the kitchen while cooking—“Let’s see, where’s the garlic... okay, here we go”—just to avoid the weight of quiet pressing against my ears.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was running from myself.

There were thoughts I didn’t want to think. Feelings I didn’t know how to feel. And if I kept things noisy enough, fast enough, I could outrun them.

Everything changed the year I moved into my first apartment—alone.

The novelty wore off in a week. The silence didn’t.

At night, I could hear the old pipes ticking in the walls, the creak of floorboards settling above me, the occasional siren slicing through the city’s dusk. But the loudest thing was the absence of anyone else. The absence of words.

I would play podcasts just to feel like someone was there. I'd fall asleep with YouTube videos playing in the background. I'd scroll through social media until my thumb felt numb. I thought distraction would make it better.

It didn’t.

If anything, it made the silence heavier—like a scream being muffled by layers of noise that never quite reached the soul.

One evening in early spring, I came home from work and my phone was dead. My charger had stopped working. No music. No calls. No distractions.

I sat on the floor of my living room, eating leftover pasta straight from the container. It was quiet. Too quiet.

I could feel my chest tightening, my brain begging me to do something—clean, read, hum, anything.

But I didn’t. I stayed there, cross-legged on the rug, chewing cold spaghetti, listening to nothing.

And in that nothing… something stirred.

Not a voice. Not a ghost. Not even a thought, really. Just a presence.

Like my real self was sitting in the room with me, waiting patiently.

I cried.

After that night, I started sitting with silence on purpose.

At first, it was five minutes in the morning—before emails, before news, before the caffeine. Just me and the light pouring in through the blinds.

Then I started walking without headphones.

Then driving without music.

Each time, I expected discomfort. Panic, even. But instead, the silence became a companion.

It held space for me.

It let my thoughts rise without judgment.

It made the moments feel longer—and more mine.

I began noticing things I'd never paid attention to before. The way my breath sounded in the cold. The soft thump of my heartbeat during stillness. The tiny creak in my knees when I shifted positions on the floor.

I started writing again.

Not for an audience. Just for me.

Because in silence, the real words have room to show up.

The biggest surprise? I started listening better.

To friends. To coworkers. Even to strangers.

When someone spoke, I wasn’t already planning my reply in my head. I wasn’t filling pauses with nervous chuckles or one-liners. I could just be there, hearing what they meant—even when they didn’t say it out loud.

Silence made me less afraid of other people.

And, somehow, less afraid of myself.

There’s a park near my apartment now where I go often. It’s not big, and the benches are old and splintered. But in the early evening, when the light softens and the city slows down, it’s the perfect place to sit. No phone. No talking. Just presence.

People rush past me sometimes—joggers, dog walkers, students on calls—and I wonder if they see me and think I’m doing nothing.

But that’s the thing.

In that stillness, I’ve found everything I was avoiding.

The fear. The sadness. The shame.

But also the peace. The clarity. The groundedness that comes from not needing to escape your own mind.

Learning to sit with silence didn’t change my life overnight.

It didn’t erase my anxiety or make me some Zen master of emotional control.

But it gave me something I never had before:

A place inside myself that doesn’t need to be explained or filled or performed.

A place I can return to, anytime the world gets too loud.

And now?

Sometimes I still talk to myself when I cook.

But more often than not, I don’t.

I just listen to the quiet.

And for the first time, I feel like it listens back.