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For years, acting out was how I got through things I didn’t want to deal with. If there was a project at work I was dreading, or a conversation I didn’t want to have, acting out is what let me finally sit down and do it. It worked, in a narrow way. For a few minutes the pressure would let up and I could function again. But it was never peace. There was never any peace in it at all. What came right behind it was shame, hiding what I’d done, lying about where I’d been, deflecting the second anyone got close to the truth. I paid for those few minutes of relief every time, and I kept paying anyway, because it was still faster than sitting with whatever I didn’t want to feel.

Here’s the difference between what I was doing and what I have now, once you know what to look for. Numbness is an exit. It’s what happens when a feeling shows up and gets shut down before you ever really let it in, usually through some kind of distraction or escape, so what’s left is a flat, muted quiet where the feeling should have been. Calm is not an exit, it’s a landing. It’s what happens when a feeling shows up, gets felt all the way through, and passes on its own, leaving you settled instead of shut down. Numb is a door slammed shut. Calm is a room you can actually sit in. One takes something from you every time you use it. The other gives something back.

The tricky part is that numbing works, at least for a few minutes. That’s exactly why it’s so hard to give up. It genuinely does quiet the noise, the same way turning off a smoke alarm quiets the noise, without doing anything about the fire it was warning you about. Real calm takes longer to get to and it asks more of you on the way there. You have to actually let the stress, the anger, the loneliness move through your body instead of muting it.

I still catch myself reaching for the mute button sometimes. But now I can usually tell the difference within a few seconds, because numb has a flatness to it, a kind of quiet that doesn’t feel like anything, while real calm has warmth in it, a quiet that feels like something. If you’re using something right now to get through what you don’t want to deal with, a project, a conversation, anything, I get it. It got me through plenty of days too. It just never got me anywhere. Real calm will. It just doesn’t come from the door you’ve been using.

Spencer