There was a stretch of years, more than once, where I found myself on my knees on the floor of my own bedroom, trying to find someone to call. So much feeling was moving through my body that I genuinely thought I was losing my mind. I finally reached a friend and told him the truth, I was terrified. He didn’t try to fix me. He just helped me name what was actually there. I feel angry. I feel hurt. I feel sad. Nothing more complicated than that. Just letting it be there, without turning it into a story about what was wrong with me, without carrying it into the rest of my day.
You may know this place too. The moment feeling arrives faster than words can hold it, and the mind starts reaching for a reason, a story, someone to blame, anything to make it stop.
I think this is where most of us get disoriented, not in the feeling itself, but in what we do with it afterward. The explanations we reach for. The meaning we assign. The way one small moment quietly becomes a whole story about who you are. Underneath all of that noise, there is a much quieter place.
Slowly, over many years, this is what became clear to me. Inside every one of us, there isn’t one voice; there are many. There’s the one that wants to be right. The one that keeps score. The one that’s afraid, and dresses that fear up as anger, or control, or the need to be heard right now. And underneath every single one of them, quieter than all of them, is a voice that has never once lied to you.
Most of us spend our whole lives listening to the loud ones instead. You may recognize that too.
There was a time in my relationship with Toby where he would do or say something, and I would feel this surge come up in me, this need to defend myself, to be right, to make absolutely sure I was heard. And for a long time I gave in to it, every time. Until I started to notice the suffering of this way of living in a human body. It wasn’t him… Every time I chose the noise over the quiet, I was in pain afterward, a pain that had nothing to do with him at all. What I was doing with his words was showing me that I had no idea how life works. I wasn’t wrong, I just hadn’t learned the codes to my power.
And then I understood something that rearranged me. I wasn’t really angry at Toby. Something much older in me was surfacing, and he simply happened to be standing there when it rose. The argument I thought I was having with him was, underneath it, an argument I was having with myself. A way of living in my body that was painful, therefore, it just didn’t work for a woman who wanted to be free.
Once I could see that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it. And I have become quicker to say I’m sorry. Not because I am wrong more often than he is. Because I finally understood what I was actually reacting to. Of course, the time comes when sorry isn’t even necessary. That is how development works. Before you know it, you’re growing up, maturing. Every moment precious. Expressing your full potential, allowing your deeper nature to be present, magical.
I think about this often when I think about what it takes to grow up inside a relationship, rather than just get older inside one. Why would anyone want to build a life alongside someone who is still handing every hard moment over to whichever voice shouts the loudest? That’s not a judgment. I have been that person more times than I’d like to admit. It’s simply the truth of what it costs our own hearts.
So when the sting comes now, and it still does, I try to catch the moment before I hand myself over. Is this the voice that wants to win, or is this the one that has nothing to prove and nothing to lose?
I did not start listening to the quiet one until I had suffered enough from not listening. I think that is how it goes for most of us. We keep choosing the noise until the pain grows larger than our need to be right, and only then do we get quiet enough to hear what was underneath it all along.
I am still coming back to that quiet, again and again.