The Quiet Was Worse Than the Work

People assume the hard part of that season was the job. The hours, the pressure, showing up and performing.

It wasn't. The hard part was the weekends. The Quiet of the weekends was worse.

Friday evening, the laptop would close, and the house would go quiet. And I dreaded that quiet more than anything the job ever threw at me during the week.

There was nowhere to go, and honestly, it had nothing to do with the world being shut down. It had to do with my own world being small. I was watching every dollar back then, so going out wasn't really an option even if I'd had somewhere to go. And I didn't. Most of the people I used to call friends had actually been his friends, not mine. My own family, my own circle, I had let that fade out over the years without even noticing it happening. And on top of that, I was still deep in legal proceedings, so whatever energy I had left over wasn't going toward rebuilding a social life. It was going toward surviving the week.

So I would sit in that house, by myself, in a life I was still in the middle of rebuilding, and just let the quiet do whatever it was going to do to me.

During the week I had somewhere to put myself. Meetings, deadlines to be met. I could get dressed, show up on camera, sound like I had it together. And I did have it together, in that version. I leaned on that version very hard.

Saturday didn't care about that version of me. Saturday just wanted me, and for a long time I genuinely did not know who that was without a task list in front of me.

I think about this and I actually have to go back further than the job to understand it. Years before, in my marriage, I couldn't go shopping without asking permission first. I couldn't visit my own parents without it turning into a whole negotiation. I didn't have friendships outside of that relationship. At the time I didn't even call it isolation, I just called it my life. It took distance from it to see what it actually was.

So when I finally had a house where nobody was telling me where I could and couldn't go, that quiet should have felt like freedom. Instead it felt strange. Almost wrong. The permission was gone, but I hadn't caught up to that yet.

I used to think a steady paycheck meant I had built a free life for myself. It didn't. It meant I had built a stable one. Those are two different things, and I spent way longer than I want to admit thinking they were the same.

A paycheck meant I could cover the mortgage. It did not mean I was free to leave the house on a random Tuesday just because I felt like it. Freedom was a completely separate question, and for a long time I hadn't even let myself ask it out loud.

I am not going to call that season good. I am not going to say it happened for a reason, because I don't believe pain needs a reason to be worth something. But I can say this honestly. I learned the difference between stability and freedom sitting in that quiet, and I don't know that I would have learned it any other way.

I was not weak in that silence. I was surviving it, one Saturday at a time, until the day I wasn't willing to anymore.