Today’s photo isn’t part of any photo challenge, it just reflects how I feel at the moment. I’m feeling quite introverted and I don’t seem to have anything to say to anyone in real life or online. I am struggling with the fact that, on Facebook, the rot has set in quite badly.

What do I mean? Everyone on Facebook has to follow the same set of opinions, you can’t just have one opinion that agrees with other people and two that don’t, or you’re a bad human being and everyone gets angry. You have to be that background noise on Parliament TV where you can here the politicians agreeing with whoever is speaking, and they sound almost like cows mooing. “Yurrrrrrr…”

I don’t agree with everything everyone else says. I am not a mindless zombie. And no one listens to each other anymore so there’s no point even pointing out when I disagree with people because we can’t discuss such things as adults nowadays, they are just sucked into a silent vacuum of passive-aggressive, judgmental arguments left unsaid.

On the plus side, in my personal life things are going better. I have been stably back off my meds for several weeks and my therapist is helping me work through stuff. We’re keeping a pin in the bipolar diagnosis, and the ADHD one, and she suspects I developed post-natal OCD at some point in the past year, which has made everything worse.

https://www.ocduk.org/ocd/ocd-during-prenatal-postnatal/

So for now, I’m sitting in silence a lot of the time and trying to quietly get on with things. The TV is on a continuous loop of nursery rhymes, the baby is always making noises and we live by a busy road with thin windows so every passing car is audiable. But still I am sitting in silence, learning to tune it all out.

My photo is from Nepal. Kathmandu was so noisy and busy, everyone was always going and doing and seeing and selling and moving and begging and eating and… and yet the city has this strange inner silence. Anywhere else, all that busyness would have been a very stressful sensory overload, especially for me, but here, there was a silence woven through everything that made the noise easier to bear. Not words unspoken. Not the silence of death, or inactivity, or thousands of thoughts flitting from one moment to the next.

It is the silence of inner peace.