Space and quiet

I need more space and quiet in my life.  And the culprits aren't the two small people who like to simultaneously sit on top of me and scream.  They're okay.  They're just doing their jobs.

But there's a lot of other noise.  From social media, from the perpetually turned on TV, from my own anxious ever-busy brain.  I am inundated, I am surrounded.

And the paradox is, the more I am struggling, the louder it's getting in my head, the more I'm starting to feel crushed and suffocated by it all, the more I seek out the noise.

Quiet is scary.  And the noise in my head is the worst one, so maybe I think if there's just enough other noise, I will drown it out.

But I don't.

In a lot of ways it makes sense.  The more lonely I feel, the more helpless I feel, the more overwhelmed I feel, the more I seek out "easy" ways of fulfilling my needs.  "141 characters is all I can handle," I joke.  It's too hard to read a real book, so I read Internet articles.  It's too hard to write something honest and genuine and vulnerable, so I write something witty and snarky.  It's too hard to actually call someone or get out of my house so I sit and refresh Facebook for an hour.

But those things don't satisfy.  They don't mean anything.  They aren't real.

And that's not entirely true either because I have some real and meaningful exchanges on social media.  I've made real friends there.  But it's harder.  And it's rare.  And it's usually not the point.

And when I do have two kids crawling on me, and I haven't slept at night, of COURSE I need help and company and commiseration.  And of COURSE it's hard for me to do the hard stuff.  I can't just say "well, instead of tweeting, I'll write a novel and found a live support group and participate in a fun and engaging activity (okay, it's sad that I can't even come up with one to make this point, right), all before my morning coffee."

There needs to be space for the easy stuff, especially at this point of my life.

But there needs to be space without it too.