I Am the Most Whole I Have Ever Been
A noise had been a hum underneath everything.
I woke up and went for a walk.
No destination. Nothing I was supposed to be doing instead. Just feet on pavement and the neighborhood waking up around me. But the part I was not used to was the quiet.
Not the quiet of an early morning with no traffic. Not the quiet of no one being out yet. The quiet in my own mind. Not a peaceful quiet. Not the quiet of having figured something out.
A noise had stopped.
Most of the time the noise felt like static. Something I didn’t even know was there, just taking up a little bit of room in my brain, always. Like having red hair. Maybe it was a bit unique to me, but just part of me.
Lately it had taken on a more metallic quality. Loud and uncomfortable, like the sound a knife makes on a porcelain plate. The kind of sound that makes you automatically want to get away from it.
That metallic texture is what finally allowed me to notice it at all.
An Operating System
About a year ago the noise had shown up as anxiety, depression, and a persistent feeling of being misunderstood. Of being the crazy one. Of something being wrong with me that I couldn’t name.
But when I finally started unpacking it, I understood that the noise wasn’t situational. It was an operating system—a hum underneath everything.
Before now, it hadn’t felt like depression or anxiety. It was just “life.” I was walking through my days quietly negotiating, holding parts of myself back, not interacting with people the way I actually wanted to. Not liking what I actually liked. Not allowing myself to feel love the way I feel it now.
I didn’t even realize I wasn’t my whole self. I hadn’t allowed myself to know my own feelings.
My life was, by every measure I had been given, perfect. Nothing was wrong. It was the best possible version of the situation I had been told I needed to be in.
There was also this: a growing unease about the world I was living in. Questions I couldn’t stop asking. Is God real? Is any of this real? Have I spent my life on something true? Did I even really know myself, and had the people around me ever actually met me? Why was it getting so hard to be in spaces I had always called home?
For years, all of this swirled in the background. When it finally came to a head, the result was not the disorientation I thought I’d feel. It was instead, for the first time in much of my life—quiet.
I Have No Answers
And what replaced it wasn’t an answer. It was something closer to what Thich Nhat Hanh calls aimlessness—the idea that you are not a project. That you are not on your way to becoming someone. You already are all that you hope to achieve. You already are who you are supposed to be.
I already am.
That’s what the quiet was.
You are already what you want to become.
– Thich Nhat Hanh –
I am the most whole I have ever been.
I know how that sounds. It sounds like the end of a story—the part where someone wraps it up. It’s not that. I’m standing in the middle of a life that is stranger and messier than I expected, and I’m telling you I feel fine. Better than fine.
Some of you will read all that I am planning to write over the next several months as a cautionary tale. A before picture. I understand that. But I’m writing it down anyway. I want to understand it better myself, to have my mind changed where it needs changing, and to find the people whose story rhymes with mine.
Things have been stripped away. Faith, as I understood it. Family, as I imagined it. A version of myself I performed for so long I didn’t even realize I was performing. I have done things I was told would destroy me. I have lost people I loved. I have sat alone at a bar on a Tuesday night—me, an introvert who would have found that unbearable—and felt completely alive. I’ve talked with a group of strangers and felt more understood than I ever have before.
I have people in my life now who don’t need me to translate myself first. I didn’t know how much energy that cost until I wasn’t spending it anymore.
None of this was the plan. Almost none of it is what I was told would make me whole.
My Fear
I’ll be honest, writing this is hard. There is emotional content ahead. Vulnerability. Pain I’m still working through. And a persistent difficulty putting any of it into words, for two reasons.
The first is that some of what I’m experiencing is simply ineffable—too large for language. The second is that I often find myself in territory where two things that aren’t supposed to coexist both seem to be true, and I’m forced to reach for a word that doesn’t quite fit. The French have a phrase for that: faute de mieux. For lack of a better option.
My story is full of paradoxes. Grief and joy coexisting in equal measure. Regret for what could have been sitting right next to gratitude for what is. I wouldn’t trade a minute of my life to change my current reality—and I wish I’d had a different life. Both of those sentences are true. I’m not going to resolve that for you, because I can’t resolve it for myself.
What I can do is tell you what happened honestly, which mostly means not making it neater than it is.
That morning I walked until the neighborhood was fully awake. I wasn’t ready for it to end. Just a quiet moment, for me, to ponder and feel.
And then I thought—maybe it shouldn’t only be for me.
I’m writing because my therapist told me my story was unique enough to be useful. Because a song I love says if you ever leave, leave a light on—for the people who might come looking for the way out after you. Because somewhere out there is a person who needs to know that this quiet is possible.
But honestly—I’m also writing because I need people around me while I figure this out.
I usually wait until I know myself before I let people in. This is daunting for me. I go from excited to low-grade dread from the vulnerability, the judgment, the people who’ll dismiss it. It’s uncomfortable, but it feels like the right thing.
So. Here we go. I hope you follow along.