None Of Them Sound Kind.

It’s absolutely insane to me how much space I’ve been needing lately. I love people, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never needed so much distance from them before. I’ve always wanted to be around people as much as possible, but now it’s concerning how much I feel the need to be alone.

Isn’t this unhealthy?

I’ve been thinking about how much my entire life used to revolve around being available. If you texted me, I responded instantly. If you called me, I would pick up, no matter what I was doing.

If you invited me somewhere, I would literally find a way to crawl out of my own grave to show up.

Now, when someone texts me, I stare at the screen like it’s a demon trying to suck me back into the underworld. I mute chats. I leave people on read.

The funny thing is, I used to mock people who said they needed space. I thought it was an excuse, like saying “I’m working on myself” when you just want to avoid confrontation. And now I’m that clown. I catch myself typing “I just need some time” into messages and feel like one of those people I swore I’d never become.

I think about how easy it used to be to wake up and crave people. To find comfort in buzzing phones and crowded rooms. I used to chase that feeling like oxygen. Now, everything feels suffocating. I go out and hear people talk, and every sentence sounds like filler dialogue from a bad episode. “So, how’s work?” “What’s new with you?” “We should catch up more.” It all sounds like the background noise of a sitcom, laugh track missing. And all I want to do is run home and sink into the silence I pretended I hated.

There’s a scene in Bojack where Sarah Lynn says, “That’s the problem with life, right? Either you know what you want, and then you don’t get what you want, or you get what you want, and then you don’t know what you want.” That’s exactly what space feels like. I wanted it so badly, I carved out every distraction until it was just me and the walls. Now I have it, and I don’t even know what to do with it. It’s like I fought for a kind of freedom that turned out to be another cage.

The saddest part is how invisible all this looks. I laugh when I’m supposed to laugh, I post a photo once in a while, I show up to the occasional dinner. On the outside, I’m functioning. On the inside, I feel like that episode where Bojack stares into the mirror, whispering, “You are all the things that are wrong with you.” That’s what space does. It amplifies your own voice until it’s unbearable. You think silence will bring peace, but it just puts your demons on speakerphone.

And what’s worse is how normal everyone else seems. They still thrive in noise. They go out, they laugh, they build new connections like it’s nothing. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here, paralyzed by the thought of replying to a text. It feels like everyone else is fluent in a language I forgot how to speak. And no one’s patient enough to teach me again.

I used to think solitude would give me clarity. That’s the line, right? Take space, recharge, find yourself. But the joke is, I did find myself. And I don’t like what I found. I found someone brittle, someone bitter, someone who doesn’t know how to belong anymore. The space didn’t heal me. It exposed me. It held up a mirror I can’t shatter.

Sometimes I think about Free Churro, the episode where Bojack gives that monologue at his mother’s funeral. He talks for twenty minutes straight, pouring his heart out, and when he’s done, the audience laughs like it was all just a comedy routine. That’s how it feels to admit I need space. Like I’m delivering some tragic truth, but all people hear is noise they can joke about later. No one hears the desperation. No one hears the ache. They just hear me being “difficult.”

And maybe they’re right. Maybe I am difficult. Maybe I’ve become the kind of person I used to roll my eyes at. But the thing is, once you cross this line, there’s no going back. Once you start needing silence more than sound, people more often become intrusions than comforts. Parties feel like zoos. Conversations feel like scripted performances. Family dinners feel like labor. And you can’t unsee it. You can’t go back to being someone who enjoys noise without questioning every second of it.

Space doesn’t save you. That’s the bitter punchline. It just isolates you long enough to realize how broken you were all along. You get what you asked for, and then you sit in it, wondering why you’re still hollow. You keep carving out more distance, thinking peace is just one more boundary away, and all you do is build a padded cell you can’t escape.

I wanted silence. I got it. And now I can hear every single thought clawing at the walls, and none of them sound kind.