How To Be the Calm You Were Never Given
This is not selfishness; it is the deepest form of service.
Maya sat in her first flat, which was truly hers, with no flatmates, no family, and no one else's energy bleeding through the walls.
The silence should have felt like freedom, but instead, it made her chest tight with anxiety. She found herself switching on the TV to fill the space, checking her mobile obsessively, creating small conflicts in her mind because the peace felt too unfamiliar, too dangerous.
Her therapist had asked her last week, "When was the last time you felt genuinely calm?" Maya had stared at the ceiling for a full minute before whispering, "I don't think I ever have."
Some of us grew up in noise.
Maya certainly had. Not just external noise, but emotional noise in her childhood home.
Unspoken rules that shifted daily. Shaky ground where love felt conditional. Big reactions from her father could erupt over burnt toast or a misplaced remote.
Uneven affection from her mum, who swung between smothering attention and cold withdrawal. The kind of environment where safety was something you earned through perfect behaviour, not something you could expect.
So Maya adapted, like so many of us do.
She became hyperaware, reading her parents' moods like weather patterns across the grey Manchester sky. She anticipated needs before they were spoken, fetching her father's slippers before he asked, tidying the lounge before her mother could find fault. She learnt to self-abandon to keep the temperature down, making herself smaller, quieter, easier to manage.
"You're such a good girl, Maya," her grandmother used to say. "So mature for your age."
Mosts of us have became brilliant at surviving, but utterly hopeless at resting.
And now, as adults like Maya, we crave calm but struggle to sit in it. We want stillness, but it feels foreign. We want peace, but it doesn't always feel safe.
Because when chaos is familiar, calm feels suspicious.
In her new flat, Maya found herself asking the same questions that haunt so many of us: What's going to go wrong? When will the other shoe drop? Do I deserve this quiet?
She'd catch herself holding her breath, waiting for the familiar sound of raised voices, the slam of doors, the emotional storms that had been the soundtrack of her childhood. The absence of drama felt like the pause before an explosion.
You are allowed to be the calm you were never given the chance to be.
Maya's therapist, Dr. Rahman, had said this to her during one challenging session. "You're allowed to unlearn the patterns that taught you you must be on edge to be loved"
It was a radical thought. Maya had spent twenty-nine years believing that her worth was tied to her ability to manage everyone else's emotions, to anticipate problems, to fix things before they broke.
The idea that she could be without performing, without managing, without carrying everyone else's storms, felt both terrifying and liberating.
"You're allowed to build a life that doesn't revolve around managing other people's moods," Dr. Rahman continued gently. "You're allowed to exhale. Fully. Deeply. Without guilt."
Being calm doesn't mean being passive, Maya learnt. It doesn't mean silencing yourself. It means creating safety from the inside out.
The first time Maya chose not to ring her mother back immediately when she called in one of her "states," her hands trembled.
She let the phone ring, recognising the familiar pattern: her mother's crisis, Maya's immediate drop-everything response, hours of emotional labour that left Maya drained and her mother temporarily soothed until the next drama.
Instead, Maya paused. She made herself a proper cup of tea; Earl Grey, not the cheap stuff and sat with her discomfort. She was learning to wait instead of panicking, to choose not to engage in old dynamics that would pull her back into a state of urgency.
When she finally called back two hours later, her mother was fine. The world hadn't ended. Maya realised, with a mixture of relief and sadness, that most of the "emergencies" in her childhood hadn't been emergencies at all.
This is what reparenting yourself looks like. Offering your inner child the gentleness they rarely received. The softness they longed for. The steady voice that says, You're safe now. You're not in that story anymore.
Maya began speaking to herself the way she wished someone had spoken to her when she was eight years old. When anxiety crept in, instead of berating herself for being "weak" or "oversensitive," she'd place a hand on her chest and whisper, "It's alright, love. You're safe here."
She bought herself flowers; something her mother had called "a waste of money." She took long baths without feeling guilty about the water bill. She said no to after-work drinks when she was tired, without crafting elaborate excuses.
These small acts of self-compassion felt revolutionary.
Being calm also means making hard choices, Maya learnt.
When her childhood friend Emma invited her to yet another night out that would inevitably involve hours of discussing Emma's latest romantic drama, Maya declined. "I can't tonight," she said, without the usual lengthy explanation.
"You've changed," Emma said, and there was accusation in her voice. "You used to be fun."
Maya felt the familiar pull to apologise, to explain, to make Emma feel better about her choice. But she recognised this pattern now, the way people who thrived on chaos often made their peace with their discomfort.
"I suppose I have changed," Maya said quietly. "I'm learning to protect my peace."
It hurt, losing some friendships. But Maya was finally understanding that protecting her peace wasn't selfish, it was essential. Not because she thought she was better than anyone, but because she finally knew what her nervous system needed to thrive.
The night Maya realised she was becoming the calm she'd never been given, she was sitting in her lounge, reading a book by lamplight.
Rain pattered against the windows, the same rain that used to make her anxious as a child because it meant everyone would be stuck inside together, tensions rising.
Now, the sound was soothing. Her flat was warm and quiet. Her phone was in the other room. There was no one to monitor, no emotional temperature to manage, no storms to weather.
For the first time in her life, Maya felt genuinely safe.
She wasn't meant to carry everyone else's storms, she realised. She was allowed to come in from the rain, to build a shelter inside herself, to become the safe space she'd never had.
Not just for others, but for herself.
The calm wasn't something that happened to her. It was something she chose, every day, through small acts of self-respect, boundary-setting, and gentle self-talk.
It was something she was becoming, one moment at a time ... and in that peaceful evening light, Maya finally understood: she was home.