Saturday morning. 6:47 AM.
I wake up in the dark, that restless feeling already humming under my skin. Not anxiety exactly. More like pressure. Or an itch I can’t locate. Like my skin doesn’t quite fit right.
Rumi is still snoring in his doggy bed. My husband’s breathing is deep and steady. Nobody needs anything from me. There’s no deadline today. No emergency. No place I have to be.
Just space. Empty, unscheduled space.
The discomfort rises immediately.
I grab my phone from the nightstand and turn it on as I slip out of bed, trying not to wake anyone. The screen glows in the darkness as I pad downstairs.
Nothing has changed since last night. No emergencies. No messages that can’t wait.
I turn it back off.
In the bathroom, I brush my teeth, the restlessness still humming underneath everything. I drink a glass of water slowly, trying to anchor myself. Finally, I settle into my comfy chair in the living room. The house is still dark and quiet.
I turn the phone back on.
This is ridiculous.
I stare at the screen. Swipe through the apps. Turn it off again and set it on the side table. Force myself to just… be here. In the quiet. In this uncomfortable space. Waiting for the light to change outside the window.
The restlessness gets louder when there’s nothing to drown it out.
This has been happening for weeks now. Maybe months.
That antsy feeling, like I want out of my own skin. And my automatic response: reach for something. Anything. Email. YouTube. Articles I don’t care about. Podcasts I won’t finish. Shows I don’t enjoy anymore. Books that don’t hold my attention.
The weird part? I’m way less tethered to my phone than most people I know. I don’t scroll social media for hours. I don’t check it compulsively. I often leave it in another room for hours without noticing.
But the moment I feel that restless discomfort, I’m reaching for something to resolve it.
But lately, nothing’s working.
I’ve outgrown my usual escapes. The distractions that used to soothe this feeling aren’t landing anymore. But I keep reaching for them anyway, from muscle memory. Like if I just find the right distraction, this uncomfortable feeling will finally go away.
It doesn’t.
There was this group I’d been part of for a few years. Weekly commitment. Same time, same people, same activity.
For months, maybe longer, I’d been looking for excuses not to go. A deadline. A scheduling conflict. Something would always “come up” right around that time each week. I’d feel guilty about canceling, then relieved when I didn’t have to be there, then this low-grade dread about having to go back the next week.
You know that feeling? When you’re doing something because it sounds good on paper, because you should enjoy it, because leaving would disappoint people, but your body is starting to tell you to get out?
When I was busier, it was easier to ignore that message. I could miss a session, get some breathing room, then convince myself next week would be better. The busyness itself was a buffer. A way to avoid admitting what I already knew but didn’t want to face.
But with more space, more quiet, more of that restless discomfort I wasn’t filling anymore, I couldn’t pretend.
I didn’t want to be there. Hadn’t wanted to be there for longer than I wanted to admit.
In some cosmic rescue scenario, the ending came fast—a conflict that felt like relief masquerading as drama. The permission I’d been waiting for to finally say it out loud: I’m done.
What surprised me wasn’t the relief. It was how much relief. Like setting down a backpack I’d forgotten I was carrying. My shoulders actually felt lighter. I could breathe deeper.
And underneath that relief? An uncomfortable recognition of a pattern I’ve been running my whole life: making myself do things I know I don’t want to be doing. Out of fear of conflict. Fear of disappointing someone. That old belief that I should want this, so something must be wrong with me that I don’t.
And as usual, I hadn’t let myself feel it fully until I stopped being busy enough to drown it out.
Somewhere in all this, I finally told my husband about my ongoing boredom and restlessness. Turns out he’d been feeling it too.
Over the past couple of years, our lives had been full of big plans and opportunities. But recently, we had walked away from some, put others on hold. That left us faced with just regular day-to-day life. No big moves on the horizon. Just what’s right here, right now.
At first, it felt like getting off an extended rollercoaster ride. We wobbled, got our bearings. Exhaled. Settled into stability.
Then the boredom hit.
That restlessness of not having something compelling to look forward to. To dream about. To distract with.
We live a very quiet life in eight acres of forest and work from home in our own business. So it’s easy to feel isolated. Cabin fever comes fast if we’re not careful. Sure, we go to the gym and out to lunch a few times a week. But we’d slipped into a rut. Nothing big and new on the horizon. Trying to find the balance between being over-busy and not busy enough.
Exactly where is that line, anyway?
You can’t find out if you’re always so overcommitted and frenetically active that you never stop to look.
In modern life, with a device in each hand and nonstop access to the world, we don’t allow ourselves to be bored anymore. Before that antsy feeling even has a chance to spark, we smother it with another distraction. Always available, always more, always louder.
But when I let myself sit through the discomfort and let it run its course? Untold gems await on the other side. Inspiration. Creativity. Intuition.
If I’m never idle enough to hear those quiet inner nudges, I miss important messages from my psyche. From life. From whatever that deeper part of me is that only speaks in whispers.
New ideas only ignite when I’m still enough to notice the spark.
Curiosities. Longings. Possibilities.
Another Saturday morning. Too early for the light yet. The house is quiet. The birds are still asleep. I’m sitting in the pre-dawn dark. I left my phone on the nightstand. Off. Rumi is snoring softly.
That familiar restlessness hums beneath my skin.
But something’s different this morning.
Instead of urgency, the need to fix, to fill, to do, there’s a curious stillness. Like waiting for the tide to turn. That moment when the water pauses between coming in and going out, when everything goes quiet and you can feel the shift coming.
I don’t know what’s coming. The discomfort is still here. But I’m not fighting it anymore.
I’m just… here. The restlessness is here too, humming along like everything else. A feeling moving through, the same way wind moves through trees.
Not mine to fix. Not a problem to solve.
Just another happening.
Maybe that’s the real shift. Not that the restlessness disappeared, but that I stopped treating it like it meant something was wrong.
The light is beginning to change outside my window. Dawn coming whether I’m ready or not.
The next breath. The first birdsong. The restlessness. The curiosity about what wants to emerge next.
Each moment unfolding. And me, right here, unfolding with it.
