How to Avoid Stillness Because It Will Eat You Alive
A raw guide to outrunning overthinking, anxiety, and emotional collapse through movement and noise
First rule, stay on your feet.
People sit down
and the floor opens.
Every unfinished grief waits there,
every sealed room cracks open,
every memory you shoved into storage
starts yelling for air.
So keep moving.
Turn the music up.
Not soft music.
Not acoustic guitar background noise.
Something loud enough to drown out your own head.
If possible, Nirvana.
If not Nirvana, something that sounds like the inside of your skull.
Scrub something until your arms ache.
Get on your hands and knees and clean baseboards
like you’re trying to evict a demon.
Organize a drawer that was already fine.
Look up flights you absolutely cannot afford.
Text someone.
Change subjects mid message.
Keep it messy. Keep it moving.
Momentum matters.
Movement keeps you alive.
Someone will suggest breathing exercises.
Tell them sure
and then go walk three miles instead.
Stillness will try to convince you it’s peace.
It smiles while it closes the doors.
Then you’re stuck in a hallway
with fluorescent lights
and your own thoughts echoing back at you.
So you outrun it.
You fill boxes.
You canoe fifty miles with kids.
You jump out of airplanes.
You refuse to disappear.
And sometimes the quiet still catches you
and the room fills up anyway.
Remember this.
It hasn’t killed you yet.
Stand back up.
About the Creator
Fatal Serendipity
Fatal Serendipity writes flash, micro, speculative and literary fiction, and poetry. Their work explores memory, impermanence, and the quiet fractures between grief, silence, connection and change. They linger in liminal spaces and moments.
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Comments (1)
Oooh, snap! this is awesome and spot on! I used to actively hunt the peace of silence in stillness but I’ve found lately that the best (right now the ONLY) way for me to achieve silence and quiet down the buzzing is to embrace distraction. Stopping to try to be silent in stillness will invariably lead to me ruminating on things that depress me to an extreme degree. I do miss the restorative feeling and the rejuvenation that comes with silent meditation but I can’t achieve anything like that nowadays. Chasing movement and stimulation doesn’t feel like a sustainable fix though, after least for me. It feels like a survival mechanism, and an emotional bandaid. For me your poem calls a lot of this to mind! It presents a challenge so I’d call this effective and engaging art! Great work writing this :)