How to Sit: What I Learned When I Finally Stopped Running

After the landslide, literal and emotional, I stopped running.

What followed was the most honest season of my life.

This is what it taught me. About stillness. About shame. About peace.

How to Sit

I used to run.

Always doing. Always going.

Always staying one step ahead of the ache.

It looked like ambition. It looked like life.

But mostly—it was escape.

Because if I stayed busy enough,

I didn’t have to feel the loneliness.

The emptiness.

The low hum of unworthiness I didn’t yet know how to name.

Movement kept me safe from stillness—

And stillness was where the truth lived.

I didn’t know then that rest could be safe.

That quiet wouldn’t swallow me.

That I could sit with myself and survive it.

After the landslide, I couldn’t run anymore.

The world cracked open, and so did I.

So I did something radical.

I stayed.

I made a room my refuge.

At first, I curled into it like a wound.

Too tender. Too tired.

Too full of what I hadn’t let myself feel.

But the room held me.

And slowly, I learned to sit.

I sat in grief.

In fear.

In loneliness so sharp it made my bones ache.

In silence so loud I could hear everything I’d buried.

I sat with deep internal shame.

The kind that told me I was never quite good enough,

That I was fundamentally unlovable,

That if I made a mistake, it wasn’t just a mistake,

It meant I was bad.

I sat with the echoes of old stories I didn’t realize I was still carrying.

That love had to be earned.

That my worth was conditional.

That if I wasn’t useful, impressive, or strong,

I didn’t belong.

I sat with heartbreak.

Not just from men, but from the world.

From betrayals, from abandonment, from the places I’d been overlooked.

I sat with the ache of being unseen,

And the even sharper ache of being seen and still not chosen.

I sat with the small voice inside me that whispered,

“I want more.”

And the louder voice that snapped back,

“You don’t deserve it.”

And still,

I stayed.

I sat with my children beside me,

Their breath steady when mine wasn’t.

I sat with the ache of loving them so much it hurt,

And the quiet terror of wondering if I was doing any of it right.

I sat with my own voice.

Journals full of it.

Practicing “I” statements like a new language.

Writing love letters to the parts of me I used to abandon.

Documenting what wasn’t acceptable.

Dreaming of what was.

I sat in joy, too.

Wrapped Christmas presents on my bed.

Laughed at shows.

Held my kids close,

Felt the sacred weight of their heads resting on my shoulder.

This room has seen more of me than anyone ever has.

Not because I was hiding

But because I finally stopped hiding from myself.

I once bought a book called How to Sit.

Now, I don’t need the book.

I have this room.

I have this body.

I have this life I’ve learned to live from the inside out.

Because it was never just about sitting.

It was about staying.

About not abandoning myself when things got quiet.

About coming to peace with who I am,

Even when no one’s watching.

And peace, real peace,

Is everything.