For months…years…I longed with all my might to live somewhere utterly quiet but that’s a classic case of “be careful what you wish for” because, it turns out, a place can be too quiet!

In fact, the place where we are currently renting a house until we can, finally, move into the house that is proving so very slow to purchase, is so very quiet that the quiet itself has its own sound and is almost deafening!

Before we got here, I had believed (for some considerable time) that all my answers lay in moving to some “Really Quiet Place” (the idea of such a place having taken on its own substance, like a sort of citadel in the sky) where my nervous system could unpack itself and all my sensory processing challenges abate for a while. After a few months here, it turns out they haven’t gone anywhere, in fact I would say that the pin-drop silence here seems to aggravate them all the more as my ever hypervigilent neurodivergent nervous system seems unprepared to go off duty here at all, specifically because of the quiet and the sheer vastness of that quiet because, I guess, it is always searching for the anomaly like a needle in a haystack. Back where we used to live, it never had to search that hard as there were always noise distractions to be had, layered one on top of the other.

That all-pervasive quiet is no benign neutrality, as it turns out, but has a bulk and lifeform all of its own. Sometimes it seems to oscillate and pulsate, invading the brain, obsessing it, distracting it with a heady swell that consumes all its corners and takes me over until I have to work extremely hard to push it out again, using some other sort of noise or distraction that is, at least temporarily, bigger than it is. This turns into a daily competition to the death but what quiet has on its side is stealth since the sheer utterness of the silence here has this habit of carrying me along with it, beguiled…for hours…if I don’t at first notice it is there!

So there are days when I, inevitably, let it carry me away…until I suddenly realise how it’s really got my mood down or made me even more intent than usual on my tasks or thoughts (obsessional…) and then, once I realise what its done to my day, it’s a big hurry to repair the damage with cheerful music, the voices on a podcast, anything at all to loosen it’s strangle grip. So now I’ve become just as dependent on my headphones and distractionary behaviours as I ever was in the noisy old place!

The fact I suffer from incessant and extremely loud, invasive, quite honestly near-unbearable, tinnitus doesn’t help. Is it my imagination or has my tinnitus become a lot worse, more shrill and all-consuming since we moved here?  I’m certainly far less adept at distracting my attention away from it and perhaps the silence wouldn’t be such a torture-merchant if it wasn’t for that since distraction is still considered to be the best (only?) “cure” for tinnitus. The nights are the worst so its now really impacting my sleep, but that feels like it’s mainly because the days offer no let-up; the days and nights simply blending with each other here like nowhere I have ever spent time and they just keep on rolling, hardly a thing to differentiate one from the other. Yes, this place is as silent as the grave (does silence inevitably lead to thoughts of graves?), day or night, and it’s driving me as nuts as the incessant noise where we used to live.  I’m not the only one as my husband is finding the same thing too; we just look at each other across the silent room, sometimes, and our expressions say it all!

I guess I’m lucky that I get this chance to try out the opposite factor to what I once knew as my only reality as not everybody does. In fact, thank god I got to try it before making a commitment to a permanent place to live because at least this is only temporary (though not as temporary as we thought, several months in and more to come). As I mentioned before, no doubt as a backlash to how desperate we were to detox from incessant road and neighbour noise outside our old house, we very nearly purchased a house in a place just as quiet as this one, which seemed like a great idea at the time…thank goodness it fell through!

Even the birds, of which there are an eerie paucity, seem to move around so quietly, stealthily here, like they don’t want to alert anybody that they’re about, so no robin trills, no blackbird or thrush song though we have seen them about and, with not a single sighting of a sparrow, no hedgerow chatter either. After the heavy bird traffic of the old place, I find the absence of bird sounds to be one of the hardest factors to contend with because I think it acts like a message to my subconscious that something is desperately wrong here and my husband has expressed the same thought more than once. You know how everything can become incredibly still and the birds stop singing right before a storm? Well it kind of feels like that, all of the time with no abatement, which subconsciously builds up the muscle tension of being poised, waiting for something to happen, all the time. Though I know I’ve written about it before, I never realised quite how much I rely on the soundtrack of bird sounds, and their constant flit back and forth in my peripheral gaze, to comfort and motivate me through life but there it is, I apparently do.

Yet oddly, for such an introvert, it’s the complete lack of people or signs of domestic human life in general that is really getting to me. We live on the edge of a small picturesque village, with another one almost the same distance in the other direction, so close that they are virtually the same place, and we walk around them daily, yet on the average day we encounter a head count of zero and there are no domestic sounds to speak of. The absence of people is strangely disconcerting when there are so many houses (perhaps more so than when there are none). I never imagined that this would be such a problem after the urban nightmare of just too many of them where we were before but it turns out there is a happy medium. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a big family in a street where the neighbours all interacted with each other but having people around can be comforting, yes even for an introvert.

Here, it’s as though there could have been a zombie apocalypse in the night…everyone has been eaten and their houses left bizarrely intact yet no one at home. Like the stage set for some BBC costume drama they are about to film, the picturesque lanes and honeyed stone cottages wait poised for the clapperboard to come down yet nobody waits in the wings. The odd time someone has ever shown up around a corner of a lane or bobbed up from a flower bed, and I can count the times on one hand with fingers to spare, their art of conversation with a stranger has been so very unlubricated, even reluctant, that it’s hardly made for a highlight. I find myself ravenously hungry for the occasional diet of humour, warmth or enthusiasm with complete strangers when we go out, those kinds of impromptu interactions that remind you of your common humanity, as it’s proving to be scarce around here!

Not that I was getting it in the old place because, you know how the truism goes, there’s nothing lonelier than a crowd but that’s why we moved, so it’s pretty ironic to discover that village life in somewhere this quiet, isolated and (you would therefore think) “tight knit”, warm, relaxed, mutually dependent can be even lonelier. If it weren’t for a complete lack of traffic back and forth, I’d wonder if this had become one of those dormitory villages where everyone commutes to pay for their mortgage but I don’t think so given no sign of large numbers coming or going…far more likely that they are all indoors, quietly working or doing whatever they do by themselves.

I’m left to conclude that quiet people move here to be, well, quiet and the biggest shock of all is that I’m apparently not one of them. I sometimes fantasise about banging a saucepan lid like a gong on the grassy mound where we (quietly) sit enjoying the view most days on our walk, just to see if anybody comes out!

Mostly, I long for a few signs of domesticity…a lawn mower or power tool sound from somebody’s shed, a couple of neighbours passing the time of day, birds attracted to bird feeders chattering away in the hedgerows and (yes I never thought I’d say it) the occasional hum of a car passing by. We stayed somewhere like that a couple of weeks ago whilst renting a small Airbnb on an average road in a small quiet town to visit family. This turned out to be my kind of quiet…an alive kind of quiet…where people get on with their lives, softly but audibly, and stop for chats or at least to say hello on the streets. We would wake up to the kind of audio cues that oriented us through the sheer familiarity of the sounds and the effect was to reassure and relax the nervous system, not leave it on high alert, plus there was the constant backdrop of bird-chatter in the garden, which was so starkly contrasting with where we are now that it almost made me weep with gratitude and relief. It was like manna from heaven to my hungry nervous system and I didn’t want to leave!

I guess what that level of quiet was, to me, amounts to the “happy medium” I just alluded to which, I suppose, is exactly what we’re all looking for in all the various quarters of our lives. We tend to think we want some extremely strong version of what we think we long for on the full spectrum of choices, and often it’s the very opposite of what we currently have, but that’s usually just a reaction. The best life we can ever live, for ourselves (not some other person), is never a reaction but a choice. I try to take comfort from the fact that my own personal happy medium is becoming more apparent every day that I spend here!

The daily reality of this is much harder to swallow than the idea of it and feels so isolating, lonely, repetitive, boring and without the sufficient stimulation to call a balanced life…far too much like a sort or death within life or a waiting room for death since it could slide in quite seamlessly here and hardly be an inconvenience to anybody. I guess, in that sense, it feels like my very worst idea of “retirement”; the kind they often say curtails a life because you lose sight of anything to live for. We try to stay on the bright side, but there’s a primal scream of resistance to staying here going off in both our heads (not helped by some issues with the cottage that make it less than ideal in the longer term and the fact of it not being ours so we can’t make any changes). We know we can’t wait to leave, that every muscle is poised for the news that we can. The only way we are coping, as per my last blog, is by creating a busy schedule of weekend distractions to help get us through what we know doesn’t suit us and would otherwise send us mad. However, I persist with seeing the upside, my best observations being as follows, which I write out in the hopes of holding to these thoughts more than the negatives and as foot grooves to the next phase of our move.

There’s no doubting, it has been useful to break the chain of reactions of my life, to get to play with opposites without long term commitment, to try things on for size without making another lengthy mistake. How many people get to try out such polarities of lifestyle, all within the space of a few months, so they can do the contrast and pick out the best bits? Painful as it continues to be while we live in a holding pattern in this stop-gap place, this is also turning out to be a once-in-lifetime gift, an interlude that will greatly benefit me in terms of much increased self-knowledge, so I’m trying my best to appreciate it as it happens. I can see how it mirrors the same kind of benefits, the hard-won “upsides”, of chronic illness, although it can be equally hard to hold onto such positive thoughts during the day-to-day grind of endless symptoms. Yet, from the higher perspective, there’s no doubt that the wholesale interruption to my life that being forced by chronic illness to quit work, to change all my routines, my goals, my expectations, priorities and my very sense of self amounted to, has facilitated a massive upgrade of self-awareness over the last few years; I am simply not the same person, nor on the same trajectory, as before and that is resoundingly for the best. Hopefully, this time spent in quietude is doing likewise, in a much more concentrated form. Perhaps it’s even serving as one last major revision of “what I really want” before I get to move on with the kind of life that I, mindfully, choose to curate from now on. And curating our lives to our exact, unique, requirements against the stream of “normality” is the best hope we have as a neurodivergent individuals!

Because life becomes its own upgrade when we get to surprise ourselves with what we find out about ourselves and then forced to be utterly, ruthlessly, honest about what we really want, which often turns out not to be what we used to think that we wanted, perhaps for a very long time until now. Not nearly enough of us get to experience an interruption to what we thought we wanted in our lives so that we get to reboot what we really want from a place of consideration, not accident and thus to grow instead of staying stuck in our old beliefs. Fixed ideas take over our heads, we get led by the popular culture, we react in a knee-jerk way, we assume that we want what other people want because its “normal”, we fall down the trap of people pleasing…yes, the whole territory is fraught with pitfalls that try to suck us into a version of what we think we want that might be miles off the truth of what would really best suit us. However, if we ever get a chance to pull back, to try out a different version of life without signing-up forever, to sample something different for a change and maybe laugh at ourselves a little too (because it can be so amusing to realise that we are not quite made the way we always thought we were and are sometimes the very opposite), we also get to learn much more about ourselves, to grow and evolve our lives much closer to the life that will help us to truly thrive, simply because it’s a better, healthier, much more customised fit. Once we realise this, the circumstance that got us to the understanding (health issues included) can recede into the background because we finally got the message!

If it wasn’t for this most inconvenient interlude in our relocation process, I might have spent a lifetime assuming that I wanted a way of life that, it turns out, I really don’t want at all…however picturesque and idyllic it seems as depicted in aspirational magazines or how wistfully desirable “moving to the country” or “going a little off grid” is made to sound in our runaway culture. As it turns out, I’d rather live somewhere less picturesque yet far more connected to the pulse of life, somewhere I can walk to places and join in at least by evidencing with my senses that I am not completely alone. Not only is this useful for me to know but it’s incredibly life-affirming and a much healthier assumption for me to have than my old one, being that my highest objective was to withdraw from all influence of community, to choose autonomy, even isolation, over participation and proximity, to desire extremely low stimulation rather than risk over stimulation because I struggle with that. I’d been hard bitten by bad experiences of being around too many of the wrong experiences and sensory provocations and so been made shy. However these were just reactions, assumptions, backlashes, a case of swinging too far the other way and, it turns out, they were utterly wrong for me.

I now think it’s more a case of wanting to self-select what I’m part of and exposed to, not be swept along in some tidal current as it used to feel like. The choice to participate and experience, on my own best terms, feels far more healthy than this abject disconnect taken to its furthest conclusion of living so much like a hermit I could easily forget how to interact altogether if I didn’t also have the pressing urge to resurface for a gasp of air and some stimulation at least once a week, to keep me practising how to be around other people and sensations, especially as, for me, it doesn’t always come naturally. Just like I have lost confidence driving a car from lack of use, I would quickly lose confidence being anywhere that other people hang out or where my senses get to be challenged by something different and that, I can see so clearly, would be to my detriment.

I can also see how, through the effects of age, fatigue and a kind of seeping effect of the quietude here (because I’ve really started to notice how it starts to penetrate, much like the mossy dampness that infiltrates all the stonework here…so that the longer I stay, the more its effects seem to saturate my mentality) that quiet would eventually draw me in, make me like itself and swallow me. Nature’s effects are just too powerful, too uninterrupted, here and I would likely succumb to the mostly abstract, highly introspective inner world that already preoccupies me until it completely takes me over; something which would not, in my case, be the healthiest thing because I would find it all too easy to surrender to it, to become ungrounded and quietly disappear from the fabric of life. It’s already taking me double the effort to be bothered to write these posts or to other people lately, I’m becoming more introverted by the day after quite the outgoing phase and that just isn’t healthy.

Whilst such an outcome may seem like the forgone conclusion of autism and high sensitivity, I no longer believe that to be the case, at least not for me; in fact, isolation is making the hard parts of those things even harder and forcing me to rethink the benefits. I now believe, in fact I feel like I know, that a far healthier balance exists for me when I reach out towards some positive interactions, sounds, sights and other stimulations, even those that challenge me from time to time, as signs of life rather than chasing after avoidance and I intend to do my darnedest to achieve such a balance in the next phase of our move.