The Strange Thing That Happens When Your Life Finally Gets Quiet

A lifetime of chaos gave way to three unexpectedly peaceful years—just as the outside world started acting like a reality show that has clearly run out of responsible producers.

After a long season of life being a bag of dicks, we somehow ended up here: a quiet little life in San Luis Obispo with happy kids, good views, and a house where the vibes are carefully curated and fiercely protected. Photo: Heather Morgan Photography

If you spend enough of your life navigating chaos, it eventually stops feeling like chaos and starts feeling like the weather. It’s simply the atmosphere you live in. Some people grow up with calm seas and gentle breezes; others seem to spend their lives sailing through permanent Hurricane Katrina. After a while, you stop asking whether the storms are normal and instead focus on learning how to keep the boat upright while the wind keeps changing direction.

For a long time, that was simply the climate of my life. Trauma has a way of training your nervous system to function like a hyper-alert guard dog, constantly scanning the horizon for the next thing that might go wrong. You become very good at anticipating problems, diffusing tension, and surviving inside emotional environments that would make calmer people slowly back out of the room while pretending they forgot something in their car.

The strange side effect of living that way for years is that calm can start to feel suspicious. When the wind suddenly dies down, your first instinct isn’t to relax. It’s to ponder what epic shit show the storm is planning next.

Over the last three years, though, something in my life has been quietly shifting. Not in the dramatic, cinematic way that self-help books like to promise, where you wake up one morning to discover that you’ve transformed into a serene person who drinks green juice and journals under a Himalayan salt lamp. The change has been subtler than that, more like the moment when the tide slowly pulls back and you realize that the shoreline looks completely different than it did before.

A wholesome moment in a picturesque town that absolutely does not hint at the wildly chaotic backstory required to get us here. Photo by Heather Morgan Photography

The chaos that once defined the emotional climate of my life has gradually receded, and in its place something far less glamorous but infinitely more valuable has appeared: stability.

I’m not talking about the kind of curated perfection that people perform on Instagram, where every kitchen looks like it is straight out of Pinterest and everyone claims to have discovered the secret to effortless happiness. I’m talking about the far more underrated experience of a life where the basics have settled into something predictable. The bills are handled. The routines are steady. The emotional atmosphere inside the house is calm enough that people can actually exhale.

Perhaps the most meaningful shift is that the vibe of my home is no longer outsourced to someone else’s mood. For a long time, like many women, I lived in environments where the emotional temperature of the entire household could be dictated by whichever man in the room happened to be carrying the most anger that day. When someone like that occupies your space, their energy spreads through the house the way cigarette smoke spreads through a room, enveloping everything and everyone in a carcinogenic, grey haze.

These days the atmosphere is different. The tone of the home belongs to me now. I’m the one who maintains it, protects it, and decides what kind of energy gets to live inside these walls. The absence of someone else’s constant frustration has created a kind of quiet that I hadn’t fully realized I was missing. Once that quiet appeared, something unexpected started happening in another part of my life.

My writing came back.

For years much of my writing existed inside the orbit of social media, which has its own gravitational pull and its own strange incentives. The internet rewards speed, outrage, and commentary that can travel quickly across the cultural bloodstream. If you have a talent for satire or cultural critique, the temptation to toss sharp little observations into the arena and watch the reaction can be hard to resist. It feels a bit like stepping onto a stage and throwing out a line to see whether the crowd laughs or throws tomatoes, or better yet, if the terminally bored townsfolk take the bait and opine about you on their little small town gossip blog.

There is an undeniable adrenaline to that kind of writing, but adrenaline and curiosity are not the same thing. When your personal life is chaotic, it’s easy for creativity to become tangled up with performance. The writing starts chasing attention rather than ideas. What I’ve discovered recently is that when your life finally becomes quiet, the reason you write begins to change. The impulse doesn’t disappear, but it shifts away from the need to be seen and toward the simple pleasure of exploring something interesting.

These days my writing seems to divide itself naturally into a few different directions. I still feel drawn to writing op-eds about culture and politics with the same dark, biting humor that has always been my instinctive voice, and one that ruffles the feathers of the seemingly unbothered. The world right now is providing so much material that sometimes it feels like we’re all living inside a particularly fucked up season of Black Mirror, except the writers have clearly decided to lean harder into absurdity than anyone expected.

Alongside that part of my brain, though, there’s another creative lane that exists purely for enjoyment. Lately I’ve been writing horror stories and playing around in the strange little universe of Santa Muerte, which I’ve come to think of as the literary equivalent of brain candy. These stories are dark and weird and entertaining in the way a good campfire ghost story is entertaining. They exist simply because my imagination enjoys building them.

Out here walking through town like a peaceful little family unit while my son delivers maximum sass and I quietly remind the universe, Taylor Swift style: “I protect the family.” Photo by Heather Morgan Photography

And somewhere further down the road, I suspect there is a memoir waiting to be written. Memoir is a different kind of project altogether, one that requires a certain amount of distance from the experiences that shaped you. It asks you to look backward at your life with the kind of perspective that only appears after the storms have passed. I’m not quite there yet, but I can feel the outline of that story forming quietly in the background.

What fascinates me most about this moment is that my personal shift toward stability seems to be happening at the exact same time the outside world has become louder and more chaotic than ever. The political landscape feels increasingly surreal, cultural conversations have turned into permanent shouting matches, and social media now resembles a digital coliseum where everyone is simultaneously performing outrage and pretending it’s a conversation.

Yet inside my own life, things have grown quieter. Can The Universe just let a gal have her soft girl era?

That contrast has created a perspective I didn’t have before. When your personal survival is no longer constantly on the line, you gain the luxury of observation. The world’s madness becomes something you can examine with humor instead of something you’re desperately trying to outrun.

People often ask the standard ambition question: where do you see yourself in five years? For most of my life I felt pressure to answer that question the way ambitious people are expected to answer it, with some grand vision of transformation and upward trajectory, or the kind of achievements people wax poetic about in their annual Christmas letter. The future was supposed to involve a bigger life, a larger platform, a smaller waist, and some dramatic evolution that proved you were constantly leveling up.

These days, though, the image that comes to mind when I think about the next five years is surprisingly simple: I hope it looks a lot like this:

The reason I guard the emotional climate of this house like a bouncer at a nightclub. Photo by Heather Morgan Photography

I hope the house still feels calm. I hope the routines still work. I hope my kids continue to experience our home as the place where the noise of the outside world fades instead of the place where new tension begins. I hope the emotional tone of the space remains something I protect carefully rather than something that gets hijacked by someone else’s anger. That might not sound like ambition to someone who believes life should always be accelerating toward the next milestone, but to me it feels like something far more meaningful. It feels like durability.

The truth is that life has always had a way of dropping the other shoe eventually. Anyone who has lived long enough knows that storms arrive whether we schedule them or not. For most of my life, I tried to anticipate every possible disaster in advance, as though rehearsing the catastrophe ahead of time might somehow soften the blow when it arrived.

What I’ve realized recently is that living that way simply means you experience the crisis twice — once in your imagination and once in reality. And if you happen to be either cursed or blessed with an imagination as hauntingly vivid as mine, that strategy raises a fair question: how exactly is your gastrointestinal system holding up under this level of preventative worrying?

Pass the Pepto, babe.

These days, I spend less time obsessing over the shoe that might fall someday and more time appreciating the fact that, for the moment at least, both shoes are still firmly on the floor, and they're adorable Nike Airs that I designed myself in the color of my daughter's sports team.

There’s something quietly rebellious about choosing to enjoy stability in a culture that constantly pushes us to upgrade every aspect of our lives. The internet encourages us to believe that happiness is always waiting in the next achievement, the next relationship, the next reinvention of ourselves. But after a lifetime spent navigating storms, the ability to recognize calm when it finally arrives feels like its own kind of progress.

And oddly enough, it turns out that when your life becomes quiet, your creativity doesn’t disappear. It simply becomes yours again.