Learning to Sit With the Quiet: How Silence Became My Survival Skill While Living With Sarcoidosis

Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that silence was a problem. Not a neutral thing. Not even a mildly uncomfortable thing. A problem. Something to apologize for, rush past, smooth over, or drown out with noise before it got any ideas. We call it “awkward,” which is a fascinating choice of word, because silence itself isn’t doing anything wrong. It’s just… there. Existing. Minded its business. And yet we act like it just told an off-color joke at a dinner party.

I used to buy into that. I filled every moment. Music while cooking. Podcasts while walking. News murmuring in the background even when I wasn’t listening. Television on while I folded laundry, not because I cared what was on, but because the house felt too still without it. Quiet felt suspicious. Like if I left space for it, something uncomfortable might wander in.

Then chronic illness showed up and rewrote the rules.

When your body is loud all the time—breath that doesn’t come easily, fatigue that hums under everything, a heart that occasionally reminds you it has opinions—you start to realize that external noise isn’t neutral anymore. It stacks. It piles on. It asks things of you that you don’t always have to give. And eventually, you notice that the moments you feel most human, most grounded, most like yourself again, tend to happen when everything else shuts up.

Not in a dramatic, monastery-on-a-mountain way. I’m not sitting cross-legged chanting anything. I’m talking about the early morning kitchen, when the house is still half asleep. The refrigerator hums. The floor creaks in familiar places. One of the dogs circles twice and lets out a deep, satisfied sigh that sounds like he’s clocking in for another shift of napping. That kind of quiet. Ordinary. Domestic. Sacred in the least flashy way possible.

There’s no soundtrack. No algorithm deciding what I should feel today. Just coffee blooming in hot water and the simple fact that I’m awake and breathing and not required to react to anything yet.

That kind of silence doesn’t demand. It offers.

I think we started losing our tolerance for quiet long before smartphones, but they certainly finished the job. Every spare second is now an opportunity to consume something. We don’t wait in line; we scroll. We don’t sit with our thoughts; we outsource them to strangers with ring lights. Even rest has been turned into content. Guided. Optimized. Branded. Heaven help you if you just sit there.

And listen, I love sound. I love music. I love stories. I literally host a podcast. I am not anti-noise. I am anti-noise-by-default. There’s a difference. One is a choice. The other is a reflex.

What I’ve learned—slowly, stubbornly, the way I seem to learn everything—is that silence works like a soft reset button. Not a dramatic transformation. Not a cure-all. Just a lowering of the internal volume enough that I can tell what’s actually happening inside me.

Because when everything else goes quiet, a few things become impossible to ignore.

Like how anxious I am. Or how tired. Or how much I’ve been pushing through symptoms because it felt easier than stopping. Silence has a way of handing you the truth without commentary. No judgment. No follow-up questions. Just, “Hey. This is where you are.”

At first, that’s uncomfortable. I won’t pretend otherwise. If you’re used to filling every space, quiet can feel like standing alone in a room with your own thoughts and realizing they’ve been waiting for you. But if you don’t bolt—if you don’t immediately reach for your phone or turn something on—you start to notice something else.

Your thoughts slow down.

Not disappear. Not magically become positive or enlightened. They just stop tripping over each other. You hear one at a time instead of a crowd. And that’s when things like perspective sneak in. Or acceptance. Or at the very least, a moment where you’re not bracing for impact.

Living with sarcoidosis means I spend a lot of time monitoring myself. How’s my breathing? How’s my energy? Is this a bad day or just a weird one? Silence helps me answer those questions honestly. Without drama. Without catastrophizing. Without pretending I’m fine when I’m not.

It also makes me kinder.

I didn’t expect that part.

When I’m overstimulated, I’m shorter. Everything feels louder than it needs to be, including other people. Silence smooths the edges. It gives me room to respond instead of react. To let things slide that don’t deserve my energy. To remember that not every moment needs commentary.

And then there are the small things silence hands you back, almost as a bonus. The smell of coffee before you drink it. The way afternoon light stretches across the floor like it’s got nowhere else to be. The sound of a pet dreaming. The fact that your body, despite everything it’s been through, is still here with you.

Those details matter. Especially when you live with an illness that likes to remind you of its presence.

Silence doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t make sarcoidosis disappear. It doesn’t give me more energy or better lungs or a heart that behaves perfectly. What it does give me is a place to rest inside my own head. A pause between one demand and the next. A reminder that I don’t have to be performing my life at all times.

We talk a lot about self-care like it’s a product you can buy or a routine you can perfect. Silence is neither. It’s free. It’s inconvenient. It doesn’t come with instructions. And it asks you to trust yourself enough to sit still for a minute without distraction.

Some days, that’s harder than any symptom.

But the days I manage it—even briefly—I feel more like myself. Not the version of me trying to keep up. Not the version explaining my health to someone else. Just me. Giving my nervous system a break. Letting my thoughts settle. Breathing without narrating it.

So no, silence isn’t awkward. It’s not empty. It’s not something to fix. It’s a full space. One we’ve been trained to fear and would probably benefit from reclaiming.

I don’t need it all the time. I still love music in the kitchen and conversations that wander and stories told out loud. But I no longer treat quiet like an emergency. I let it stay. I sit with it. I trust it to do what it does best.

And more often than not, it meets me exactly where I am.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear how silence—or the lack of it—shows up in your own life with chronic illness. Leave a comment below and share your experience, or subscribe to the blog if you want more reflections like this delivered straight to you.