When the World Felt Too Loud, I Went Quiet
On freeze states, soft resilience, and choosing hope when clarity feels far away.
I haven’t posted here since January. Not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because everything felt too loud to speak over. The world kept unravelling, and somewhere between the headlines, the heartbreak, and the pressure to “show up anyway,” I went quiet.
Not in collapse but in freeze.
I suppose this is the beginning of a thaw.
Lately, I’ve found myself frozen in that quiet, half-scrolling, half-listening, half-feeling kind of way. Watching the world unravel through headlines I don’t know how to hold. Opening Instagram, closing it. Reading a news notification, then responding with a meme. Not because it was funny, but because humour has become our emotional scaffolding. We’ve developed a strange fluency in processing tragedy through jokes, as if making light of the darkness might make it a little less heavy.
There’s something strange happening.
Between doom-scrolling and forced optimism, we’ve lost our middle ground. Our emotional responses swing between flippancy and despair, between “Everything is fine” and “Everything is broken,” with very little space to sit with what’s actually true.
The world is in loud chaos right now, and many of us have gone silent in response. Not because we don’t care, but because we’re buffering. Performing composure while quietly holding on to overwhelm. Not disengaged, but disoriented. Present, but not fully available. It’s a coping strategy. It’s survival. It’s a nervous system trying to make sense of too much.
Every morning brings news that feels both entirely expected and unthinkable. Unprecedented times has lost its meaning, and yet somehow, each day still manages to feel heavier than the last. We’re over-informed. Under-resourced. Trying to process global grief at the same time we’re trying to make a living, build something meaningful, and be emotionally available in our relationships.
It’s a lot. And it’s happening all the time.
We are the most connected generation in history, and many of us have never felt more alone. Our identities fracture across platforms: professional on LinkedIn, creative on Instagram, witty on Twitter, soft on Close Friends. We message more but talk less. We perform presence while feeling untethered.
So where’s the solid ground? Where do we root when our sense of self is scattered across many stages?
Lately, I’ve been returning to what I call meaningful insignificance—the acts that feel too small to matter and yet somehow, they do. Writing a letter to a friend. Reading poetry when the headlines scream. Planting herbs in a tiny windowsill garden while the world burns.
These aren’t distractions. They’re anchors.
They tether us to ourselves when the news cycle pulls us under. They aren’t solutions—but they’re refusals. Tiny, beautiful refusals to give up on beauty, nuance, or meaning.
As a filmmaker and storyteller, I’ve always believed that stories help us survive chaos. They are how we metabolize what feels impossible to carry. And yes—our memes are stories too. Our jokes, our texts that say “I see you,” our dancing-in-the-kitchen moments. These are survival narratives. These are proof that we haven’t numbed out completely. The world feels unsteady because it is unsteady. Institutions are glitching, systems are crumbling, and the consequences of generations ripple through us now. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
But in the space between denial and despair, there is a third option: present hope.
Not the sanitized, Pinterest-quote kind.
The kind that exists in tension. The kind that says: yes, things are breaking—and yes, we still get to build. Yes, it’s exhausting—and yes, we still get to care. Yes, we’re grieving—and yes, we still get to make something beautiful here.
We often confuse resilience with hardening. But I think true resilience is softness that doesn’t collapse. Presence that doesn’t flinch. It’s the ability to stay emotionally available while the world pushes us to shut down.
Maybe real progress doesn’t look like hustle or momentum.
Maybe it looks like a garden: seasonal, sacred, requiring rest as much as bloom.
Hope isn’t a feeling. It’s a discipline. A creative practice. Something we choose in the middle of heartbreak, not in spite of it, but because of it.
And yes, some days, that hope feels impossibly small. But small doesn’t mean insignificant.
I’ve been learning this quietly: through conversations with friends that felt like exhale, community messages filled with softness, and watching people show up for each other without performance or applause.
This is what Adrienne Maree Brown calls emergent strategy: the way small acts combine to create systems—the way tenderness scales when we stay with it consistently.
So, no, hope doesn’t mean pretending things aren’t broken. It means refusing to break with them. It means staying open to what could grow in their place.
As Audre Lorde reminds us:
“The sharing of joy… forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them.”
That’s why joy matters now. It’s not the escape. It’s the bridge.
If you’ve been frozen, me too. But you’re not broken. You’re buffering. You’re still here. And that matters more than you think.
The world feels unsteady. But our capacity for connection, creativity, and care hasn’t gone anywhere. And that is something to stand on.
Where We Can Build Together
Narrative Strategy & Consulting
I help brands, creatives, and founders clarify their voice, articulate their story, and build lasting resonance. Whether you're navigating a creative pivot, refining your positioning, or translating vision into language, I bring structure to what you feel but haven’t yet said.Creative Direction & Filmmaking
I direct emotionally intelligent, visually grounded stories that move with mood and meaning. My work lives in the tension between longing and becoming—built for brands, campaigns, and cultural projects that value nuance, depth, and cinematic soul.
If you like this, you’ll love what’s next.
If you’re new—hi, I’m Ghazal. Filmmaker, creative strategist, and story architect. Creative by nature, strategic by design. I write about storytelling, creative pivots, and personal reinvention for the ones rewriting their story in real time. If that’s you, you’re in the right place.
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