for the soul: what the quiet has taught me
01: on what i've learned during my alone time
welcome to the first installment of my new collection for the soul, where i share lessons i’ve learned on my spiritual journey, some tidbits of knowledge, and short feel-good anecdotes. if you like this article, subscribe for more using the button below. it helps me a ton :) <3
author’s note
Recently, I haven’t been able to function without meditating. By meditating, I mean anything that makes me feel present in the moment while simultaneously making me feel good. That’s been manifesting itself for me as reading, listening to music, dancing and moving my body, as well as sitting in complete silence and staring at a wall.
I’ve learned to honor and even cherish the quiet. You don’t realize how much your body craves stillness until you’re still. Even if it seems mundane, that’s the point. I have to be bored in order to think. My mind has always had trouble with keeping it down. I’ve filed a lot of noise complaints as I’ve gotten older. Yet I’ve gained so much motivation to write, create, and just live from literally sitting in silence, looking at nothing but the dusty wooden walls of my attic. My own presence is comforting enough.
You can learn a lot from the silence and spending time with yourself. Here are a couple things my mind has wandered to during my downtime.
it is never too late.
This one has been circulating in my brain for a long while now. I have instilled this fear into myself that if I’m not all that I want to be right now, I am out of time to become that. I am on the clock and it is not going to stop for me and I am going to die having achieved nothing because by the time I make something of myself, it will be too late. I will be out of time. I wrote a poem about it, too!
I then feel like I cannot start something new because I’m too old and I need at least five years of advanced experience to be good at something, and another ten years to be able to say I indulge in it at all.
None of this is true. It is never too late. I can start over at any point in time, for whatever reason. Growth is not linear. I have been trying to inspire myself more, and push myself out of this narrative I’ve built entirely out of self-doubt and fear. I’m not the same person I was yesterday, last week, last month, last year. It is never too late to start over.
healing isn’t about fixing your flaws. it is about accepting them.
Your flaws, mistakes, negative traits, and weaknesses deserve just as much love and gentle care as your strengths. It is not about shaming your past self for making the choices you made and being the person you were. It is about forgiving yourself and knowing what to do differently moving forward.
Your shadow is not your enemy. Your ego is not your enemy. In order to grow out of the limiting beliefs you hold, you need to befriend your fear in a sense. That shame is not out to get you. That shame exists because it wants love, attention, acknowledgement. Your inner child is not working against you. Your inner child actually adores you, and just wants a hug is all.
Being “spiritual” and healing is not about being positive all the time, shutting out your darkness, and never feeling negative emotions. It’s actually about walking alongside your darkness and learning to accept all aspects of yourself instead of combatting them with shame. You can’t fight fire with fire.
This is a hard one for me to face, personally. I’ve always been so hard on myself. But the only way out is through, so I am slowly but surely learning to coexist with my darkness so that I can be the best version of myself I can be.
it’s not about you, actually.
I think I’m going to write a whole separate piece on this, so I won’t touch on it so much. But listen: Stop. Taking. Everything. Personally.
Just because your friend is in a bad mood and isn’t as talkative as usual does not mean they hate you and never want to speak again. 99.9% of the time, it is not about you. How people treat you has nothing to do with them. In fact, a lot of the time, how people treat you is actually a reflection of you and how you treat yourself. Your outside world is often a response to what’s going on within you.
There’s that phrase that’s like: “Treat people how you want to be treated.” I agree with this. HOWEVER.
On the contrary, treat yourself the way you want others to treat you.
it is okay to be uncertain.
This is the one I am struggling with the most. My brain does not take nicely to being unsure. I can be a “go with the flow” kind of person, but I also need to know when the flow starts and ends, and also where the flow is taking place, and also who will be at the flow and why we are going with the flow.
But it is okay to not know. You’re not going to know everything all the time. There are some things that you just won’t know until later, or won’t know at all. If you’ve done all you could to seek answers, then maybe you just aren’t meant to know.
This especially applies to other people’s feelings. It is not your job to dissect what is going on in their world, or how they feel about you. If they wanted you to know, they would tell you. If they wanted you to know, you’d know. If you are supposed to know, you will find out one way or another.
But make some peace with not knowing. Regardless of how old you are, you have so many years ahead of you. It’s okay to not have a documented timeline of every single major event that is coming next. We can’t predict our futures for a reason, because the world around us is consistently growing and evolving. It’s only best that we grow with it, and see where it takes is.
closing thoughts
I could probably write a 14-page research paper on everything else I’ve learned in 2025 alone, but I want to keep the pieces in this collection relatively short since they won’t be long essays as usual.
I hope you all find something that gives you peace today. Keep exploring. Build a better relationship with who you are. Your past selves will thank you for it.