Stranger Things is the best series, no doubt. I think that the Duffer Brothers are making the stories bigger and bigger, watching the series from Season 1 is like keep zooming out.
While looking at my camera roll, it hit me: every photo is so quiet.
A lone mountain. People all sitting alone on the train. Someone staring out the window, alone. Someone scrolling on their phone, alone. Me, alone in the frame. Even in the busiest streets, many with heads bowed to their phones, together but still alone.
I used to love Japan exactly for this quiet. As someone whose head is never silent, the muted streets, the soft voices, the absence of chaos felt like medicine.
But two months in, something shifted.
The quiet stopped feeling like peace—I couldn’t stand it when people are all working on screens in the cafés without talking to each other.
As I’ve been learning to live with my own noise (the racing thoughts, the sudden panic, the 3 a.m. spirals) instead of running from it, the country’s perfect silence, once a refuge, feels like it’s asking me to stay small and silent. I don’t want hush to be the price of calm anymore. I want noise to be a choice.
I want to be able to scream, laugh too loud, cry in public, overshare with the person next to me, let the mess spill out and still be okay. For me, this means being real. A mask is too heavy to carry.
Because when you keep everything perfectly contained, perfectly quiet… don’t you also lose the chance to be heard, to be held, to let someone answer back?
Maybe I don’t need the world to be quiet for me to feel at peace. I just need to know I’m allowed to be loud in it.