I Learned Peace From Chaos

There is a part of you that remembers who you were before you learned to manage every room. That part sits underneath the practiced calm, watching, waiting for a moment that feels safe enough to move.

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I learned calm
watching cupboard doors rattle,
tracking the level in his bottle
like it was weather.

I learned it counting breaths
while keys scraped at the lock.

I learned it by guessing which version of him
would come through the door
and rearrange the evening.

Later you called me grounded.
You liked how nothing seemed to shake me.

You never saw my jaw in the mirror after,
teeth pressed so hard my gums went numb.

You thought I was born stoic.

I just got very good
at keeping my storm where no one could see it.

“The calmest person in the room usually earned it through chaos.”

I used to think the calmest person in the room was the safest one. The wise one. The one who had life sorted. Then I started noticing who actually carried that stillness. It was the kid who watched adults fall apart and learned to regulate the whole house with his silence. It was the woman who kept her voice level while she got blamed for someone else’s chaos. It was the man who sat in the corner and tracked exits without moving his head. Calm like that rarely comes from comfort. It comes from reps. From history. From a nervous system that got trained in rooms where losing control cost too much.

In my own story, calm started as a trauma response. I grew up with an alcoholic father in a small apartment packed with big tension. There were nights where my main job was to shrink the noise. Move slow. Talk soft. Predict the mood before the door even closed. My body learned to stay contained so things did not escalate. That pattern followed me. Into school. Into relationships. Into work. I learned calm from watching what happened to the dishes, the walls, and my own skin when the room tipped the wrong way.

When you grow up like that, your nervous system wires calm to threat. You walk into a room and scan everything without noticing you’re doing it. You read tone shifts before words. You notice who is edging toward anger. You notice which chair lets you see the door. On the outside you look steady. Inside you are running complex safety calculations. It can look like maturity from a distance. Inside it feels like management. Regulation as a full time job. Hypervigilance disguised as chill.

That same history can turn into actual grounded calm, but only if you stop abandoning yourself to keep the peace. There is a difference between staying regulated and disappearing. For a long time I thought my role was to carry the tension for everyone. Partner loses it. Boss snaps. Friend unloads. I slow my breath, lower my voice, absorb the impact. My body pays. Headaches. Insomnia. Numb evenings staring at a wall. That is self-destruction with good manners. In Shadow Thoughts I called it a survival artifact, a record of what happens when you bury your own voice so deep you forget where you left it.

Real calm feels different. It still comes from chaos, but it stops sacrificing you. Real calm says, I can keep my breath steady and still name what crossed the line. Real calm sits in a room and notices, my heart is racing, my jaw is locked, this is a younger part of me bracing for an old story. Then you adjust. You step outside. You tell the truth. You leave when you need to. You let your body update the file. Each time you do that, your system learns that stillness does not always mean danger. It can start to mean choice.

There is something very Finnish about this to me. That idea of sisu. Quiet resolve. Strength that shows up when there is no good option left and you walk forward anyway. Calm that gets earned that way has weight, but it does not brag. It does not need to. It sits in the corner, notices everything, and refuses to gaslight itself about what is happening. That is the kind of calm I want for you. A calm that remembers the chaos you came through, honors the body that carried you, and refuses to put you back in those unpaid roles again.

Your nervous system does not care if you look like the reasonable one. It cares if you feel safe. It keeps score through sensation. So when a room praises your calm, you get to ask a better question in your own head. Is my calm protecting me, or just protecting everyone from seeing the truth of what this costs me. You owe that answer to yourself. No one else will ask it for you. And if you find that your calm is built on old fear, you do not have to tear it down overnight. You just start small. One honest sentence. One boundary. One exit. Little ruptures that move you toward a life where calm comes from actual safety.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

When your body goes quiet in a tense room, what is it trying to protect, and what would change if you listened to it before you tried to calm everyone else?

If you’re peeling back wounds like this one,
the 365-Day Shadow Work Journals were made for moments like these.
They speak the same language you do. Truth before comfort.
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“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.” — Thomas Merton, Hidden Ground of Love (1979)