Laura Delarato
Afraid of confronting my own thoughts, I've always used noise as a means to distract myself.
It’s 2 a.m. and I’m wired, listening to my own thoughts race as I lie awake in the middle of the woods. The quietness has gotten to me, and I’m unable to shut my brain off from all the insecurities I’ve tried to bury over the years. Silence, I begin to realize, is something I struggle with deeply.
Back in early fall, a friend and I decided to spend a weekend in an isolated cabin in the Catskills. We booked it through Getaway, a platform that provides boutique cabins in the woods outside of urban hubs like New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Portland—all packaged as a means for millennials to “escape” for a few days before hightailing it back to their jobs in the city. The cabins, which are on wheels, are small but luxe, and come with a bathroom, shower, kitchen, sitting area, and a bed, all arranged like a game of Tetris. Everything is highly curated: books with titles like Cabin Porn line the shelves; there are Lola tampons in the bathroom; and the sitting area comes with a stack of handbooks to help you spot constellations, go bird watching, attempt yoga poses, and (in case you need it) get to know your cabin-mate better. There’s even a cell phone lock box to encourage campers to give up their devices and be truly present.
The highlight, though, was a massive floor-to-ceiling window filled with a cross-hatch of autumn leaves in brilliant shades of red, orange, and yellow. There wasn't another cabin in sight. If there is a place to find calm, I thought to myself, then this is probably it.
I never encounter quiet in my everyday life. When I’m not at work, I’m checking my email, scrolling through Instagram, watching clips on YouTube, or listening to a podcast. I can’t get to sleep without the glow of Netflix on my laptop and the soft whine of New York City sirens in the background. In all honesty, before that weekend I couldn’t remember a time where everything was silent, or where I wasn’t trying to fill my mental space with a stimulant of some kind. Silence has always been when my brain dredges up the worst insecurities it can muster: the parts of my body and personality I don’t like, or my strained relationship with my family. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve needed to distract myself in order to feel safe with my thoughts.
The first few hours were calm and relaxing—exactly what I expected. We did some yoga together, took naps, made dinner, and set about building a fire pit. But by 8 p.m. I’d grabbed my phone out of the lock box. Everything was too quiet, and there was no noise to help me feel secure. It was impossible for me to sleep and, flooded with an uneasiness about being alone with myself once my friend fell asleep, I began doing every single thing Getaway had tried to prevent me from. Before I knew it, I was refinancing my student loans in between posting photos on Instagram and trying to stream an episode of The Office.
Yet around 4 a.m., after staring at our pinewood ceiling for hours, something shifted and I felt, well, present. I began to remember that I was in the middle of beautiful woods, in a gorgeous cabin, in the company of a lovely friend. The silence of the outdoors was helping me consider what was actually important—not hindering me from it. Finally, as the sun began to crest over the trees, I fell asleep.
My life will never be quiet—nor do I want it to be. But my weekend in the woods made me realize that by shutting out my thoughts and anxieties with noise, I was making them feel more overwhelming than they actually were. And since then, I’ve begun actively seeking out moments of quiet. So much so that I’ve redesigned my bedroom to become a sleep sanctuary of sorts, and I've started actively turning off all of my phone notifications. Forcing myself into the silence of the wilderness, it turns out, showed me exactly what I needed to focus on: myself.
Traveller
