“Why Does Peace Feel So Unfamiliar?”
“I thought I’d feel relieved once things finally settled down. But now that I’m not constantly fighting or fixing or fending off crisis, I just feel...weird. Restless. Uneasy. It’s like I don’t know what to do with peace. I keep waiting for something to go wrong again. I hate that stillness feels suspicious.”
Dear Aly,
That question stopped me for a moment. Because I know how often peace gets mistaken for emptiness. How silence can sound like a warning when you’ve lived inside noise. How stillness can feel suspicious when you’ve built your life around motion, management, and repair.
There’s a myth that peace feels good. But the truth is, peace often feels unfamiliar—especially to those of us who’ve spent years in survival mode. You’re not ungrateful. You’re not broken. You’re just in withdrawal from the adrenaline of chaos. And your body, brilliant as it is, hasn’t learned yet that calm is allowed.
Because when you’ve lived for a long time inside urgency—whether from trauma, caretaking, perfectionism, or simply too many demands—your nervous system recalibrates. Stress becomes your baseline. Crisis becomes your compass. Hypervigilance becomes your identity. And when the noise finally quiets down, your system doesn’t relax—it panics. It thinks something must be wrong because nothing is screaming for your attention.
That’s not dysfunction. That’s adaptation.
You wrote that peace feels unfamiliar, and I want to say: that makes sense. You were wired for disruption. You learned to find purpose in solving, in fixing, in rescuing, in trying. And when there’s nothing to fix, nothing to defend, nothing to brace against, a strange emptiness fills the room. It doesn’t feel safe. It feels like disorientation.
And maybe somewhere deep down, peace even feels like a loss. A loss of urgency. A loss of identity. A loss of something to push against.
But here’s what I want you to hear: peace isn’t the absence of meaning. It’s the space in which new meaning can emerge. Stillness isn’t a void—it’s a condition for aliveness that isn’t rooted in exhaustion. But it takes time. Peace has to be practiced. Received. Allowed. And that might mean sitting with discomfort for a while.
You don’t have to feel at home in it yet. You only have to notice when your body wants to flee, and offer it just a little more space to stay. To breathe. To trust that safety doesn’t have to be earned through effort.
Let the quiet be awkward. Let the ease be strange. You’re not failing. You’re learning a new rhythm—one where calm doesn’t mean collapse. It means belonging.
I’m learning it too.
–RJ