There’s a kind of silence that doesn’t feel peaceful.
It feels like the world has stopped noticing you exist.
And on one night—I believed it.
I believed I could slip away and the world would just… adjust.
I won’t dress this up.
I’m not trying to make it poetic.
I sat on the edge of a bed I didn’t pay for, in a place I didn’t call home.
My phone was turned off.
I’d already deleted some of the apps.
I didn’t leave a note.
Because I wasn’t trying to make a statement.
I just wanted to stop being.
It wasn’t just the headlines.
It wasn’t just the case.
It was the weight of every single thing I hadn’t said.
The grief.
The regret.
The knowing that I’d hurt people I loved
and the haunting fear that maybe I wasn’t worth trying to fix.
I thought:
“Maybe this is mercy. Maybe this is cleaner.”
But something stopped me.
Not some blinding light.
Not a text.
Not a spiritual revelation.
It was the most ordinary thing:
A thought of someone I loved.
I imagined the sound of their voice when they’d find out.
I imagined what it would do to them.
Not the press. Not the public.
Just them.
And in that moment—shame and all—I decided to sit back.
Just sit.
Just breathe.
Just not leave.
No one ever knew.
I didn’t tell anyone.
I woke up the next day and went back to pretending I was fine.
But I wasn’t.
I was shattered.
Still am, in some ways.
But I stayed.
And sometimes, staying is the most radical thing you can do.
If you’re there now—
if you’re holding that same kind of silence—
I’m not going to offer a slogan.
I’m not going to say it gets better.
I’ll just say this:
Staying didn’t fix me.
But it gave me the chance to start again.