For those who are new here, in June there was a breakup. In July, there was healing. Although for about three weeks after I posted that I was logging off for a while, I didn’t do anything that looked at all like healing.

In fact, what I did do was watch a lot of tv, which included 4 seasons of S.W.A.T….and that was AFTER finishing the last 2 seasons of Law & Order.

I told myself it was ok because I was resting, but rest has an end point doesn’t it, and this didn’t seem to have one.

It wasn’t until somewhere around the 3rd season, I realized I hadn’t left my condo in four days.

To some this kind of respite may sound peaceful, and it’s not lost on me the privilege to be able to do nothing for weeks at a time. But I eventually began to see it for what it really was, me disappearing into my own emotional prison. And once I got honest with myself about it, I had to decide whether I was going to keep calling it rest, or admit I needed to come back to my own life.

So, I did what I tell all of my clients to do: find something in your life that activates joy. For me, that has always been dancing. I’m the girl that will dance to whatever music is on the loud speakers in a department store. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bop; in my mind it is, and I’m dancing.

And just like that, I immediately put daytime dance breaks back on the calendar. I also started walking again in the morning, but an hour earlier, before the heat hit 85 degrees. I even went back to the gym, and remembered what I loved about lifting weights in the first place.

I picked up the phone and started calling my closest friends and had two hour conversations about the amazing side quests we were going to start in August. I took a spontaneous day trip to Cocoa Beach, which is about forty five minutes away, just to put my feet in something that wasn’t my own living room.

Not a single one of those things felt like a big deal at the time. But all of it was proof I was choosing to come back to myself.

When I decided to take a break at the end of June from writing, recording, and social media in general, it felt like the answer I needed at the time. After all, I came into this work with a clear goal in mind: Help a handful of women navigate life. Buy a few business investments. Live my life mostly offline. And write this newsletter on the side, to stay connected to source.

The silence of July was real (and reflective) and I’m not walking it back…but something changed.

Which is why I'm writing this here, on this platform, after a bold declaration that I. Am. Leaving. Well…

They say we make plans and God laughs, and apparently my plan to blend into the background has always been a joke.

I mean, I've always known that I could never actually live a quiet life off the grid. It just isn't who I am, maybe in an alternate universe, but certainly not this one. However, there's a difference between knowing a truth intellectually and actually living inside it.

…a girl can dream right.

And the more I ran toward that offline ideal, the more I realized I was hiding from the very thing I built this whole thing around. Showing up and telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth….while helping women do the same for themselves.

So here is that truth: I wasn't protecting my peace by going quiet. I was avoiding my calling, because answering it meant admitting how much I still had to process out loud, in front of a live captive audience.

Simply put, I was hiding. Just like some of you are currently hiding from your calling while conveniently calling it rest.

Did you ever think that you wouldn't be so tired if you just stopped running?

Anywho, unlike Jonah, it didn't take a biblical whale swallowing me up to see the light. Instead it took one screenshot from a message my daughter sent 7 years ago to pop up in my memories that set me straight.

…out of the mouths of babes. I read it and instantly thought, ok girl, it's time to get up.

So no, God didn't exactly laugh at my plan to disappear. He just wasn't going to let me keep it. And after a very long month of tussling with God, I surrendered.

And here we are.

Rest and retreat can look exactly the same from a distance. Except rest restores you, while retreat removes you. Yet both involve you going quiet, both involve an empty inbox, both leave your apartment feeling still. You see, the difference isn't what it looks like from the outside. It's what's actually happening to you underneath it all.

Rest lets the feeling finally catch up to you. Retreat is designed to keep it from catching you at all.

Those three weeks of television weren’t for nothing. I needed the time to pause. But somewhere along the way, that pause stopped being a place I was passing through and became something I was comfortably living inside of.

Sound familiar?

I didn't even notice it until I realized I'd been gone from my own life for nearly a month.

The problem is retreat borrows all of rest's language, which is what makes it so easy to miss. It calls itself self care. You feel like you’re protecting your peace, and honestly, sometimes that’s exactly what it is. I've started asking myself a harder question these days, less about whether I'm tired and more about whether I'm scared.

Tired I can sleep off. Scared doesn't care how many more seasons of television I watch.

Like most, I used to think silence protected my dignity. I mean, sometimes it did but most times it didn’t. This time, it protected my avoidance. If I never wrote about the breakup, I never had to sit with the fact that it happened. If I never said the disappointing thing out loud, I got to keep living in the version of my life where it hadn’t fully actualized.

Remove “breakup” and exchange it for whatever has pushed you into hiding.

Yes, silence can be a boundary. It can also be a hiding place that allows you to feel good about your decisions, even the bad ones. I know the difference now because I lived both versions inside the same month. The boundary version felt like relief, and it has deepened over time. The hiding version felt like relief too, at first, until it slowly turned into dread the longer it went on.

Here’s the kicker: Hiding behind silence doesn’t actually stop the feeling. It just removes the witnesses. The hurt I felt was still there while I was deactivated and unfortunately the disappointment didn’t take a break because I did.

All silence did was make sure nobody could see my face while I carried it, which felt safer for exactly as long as it took me to realize I was still carrying it, alone, in an empty condo, with nobody to hand any of it to.

There’s a distinct difference between hiding and healing. Healing has movement in it, even when it’s slow. You spend a Saturday afternoon crying, and then something in you settles a little afterward. Or you get angry, and then the anger eventually burns down to something that comes with a bit more clarity and resolve.

But hiding, it doesn’t move. You can stay in it for a year and come out exactly where you went in.

The daily dance breaks helped me track my own movement again. Some mornings they felt like I was forcing myself to feel something when the bed was the only place I wanted to be. On other mornings, I’d catch myself actually laughing and smiling, and feeling complete joy.

Getting back to my morning walks did the same thing, the fresh air and the thick blanket of Florida humidity reminded me that I was still alive. As did the two hour calls with my bestie who has known me long enough to hear what I’m not saying.

But Cocoa Beach was the turning point. There’s something about the salt water and crashing waves that reminded me life was still out there waiting, and not just the parts of it I’d been avoiding, but the good stuff too.

Funny thing about that beach, I got married there to my now ex-husband and it’s also where we spent the last Sunday before we separated…so returning for the first time in 3 years felt like reclaiming something that was once lost to a version of me that no longer exists.

A few weeks ago, the kitchen dance breaks still felt forced. They felt like something I was doing to myself on purpose. But somewhere in the last week or two, they turned into a Tuesday morning, toasted bagel in hand, and E-V-E’s “Who’s That Girl” blasting on the speakers.

I wasn’t tracking my recovery anymore or counting the days since we last spoke. I was just a woman dancing in her kitchen because a good song came on and she felt like moving.

And that my dear people, is living.

Sure, it doesn’t sound as progressive as healing, but that’s the whole point.

As you all know by now, I believe awareness without action is useless, so here’s how the three ideas above turn into something you can do on your own.

Set a real end point on your rest before you start it. Y’all know I don’t operate in abstracts…so “when I feel ready” is insufficient. Pick a date. And then once that date comes get up and get moving.

What have you been calling rest/a break that’s actually been avoidance?

Notice how your silence feels a week in, not a day in. Boundaries tend to feel steadier with time. Hiding tends to feel heavier. If the quiet is getting harder to sit in, then you have your answer.

Who or what have you gone quiet about because saying it out loud would have made it real?

Pick one small, physical act of joy and do it daily for a week, something with your body, not your phone. A walk, a dance break, a drive with the windows down. At first you’ll do it on purpose, tracking whether it’s working. Keep going until you catch yourself doing it just because you felt like it.

Is there anything in your life right now that you’re still doing to prove you’re healing, instead of just doing because you’re actually living?

Take a honest look at you life. What’s one small, physical action you could take this week, something you can actually feel in your body, and not just check off a list?

This week’s action: Do one joyful, physical thing before the week is out.

Tell me in the comments: which part of your life needs your attention most right now, and what’s one small thing you’re going to do about it?

Hiding kept me still. Healing got me moving again.

Living is what I get to do now that I’ve stopped keeping score of either one.

— Donteacia 💛