No place to come to rest

On surviving in an environment that’s never quiet

Sometimes you have to name it fully, before you start to understand why so much of your energy drains away to things others barely notice.

I’ve lived here all my life. Not recently, not temporarily and not in-between phases, but always. From the moment I can remember, until now and everything in between. This place has never been a stopover, never a backup plan or temporary solution. It has simply always been here. Always present. Always in the background. Or right at the forefront, when the noise got so overwhelming it drowned out everything. Everything except the voice inside me.

In front of the house, there’s a fairly busy road; not just a street where someone occasionally passes on a bike or waves from across the pavement, but a thoroughfare the neighbourhood squeezes itself through. Day and night. Always. Always movement, always engines and always wheels. And behind the house, slightly further away but just as present, is the Waterlinieweg. Not a quiet backstreet, not a residential lull, but a wide, four-lane city road, originally designed as a highway and still used as a current of relentless traffic. Cars, trucks, buses, scooters; they form a continuous stream you don’t just hear but feel. In your belly, in your rest, in your chest. Sometimes the sound reverberates right through the mattress. Even with white noise on. Even when you try to pretend it’s not that bad.

And then, closer still, just eighty metres from our house, there’s the bus lane. Diesel buses used to shake the dishes in the cupboards. Now they’re electric, but the silence they promised never fully arrived. The sounds have changed; less intense maybe, but still always there. The humming, the scraping, the braking, the pulling away and above all, the endless flow of people. Because there’s also a bus stop there and there’s hardly a moment when someone isn’t walking towards it or just coming back. The rhythm is predictable, yet still disturbing. It never stops. People on the phone. People smoking. Arguing, laughing or sighing. Sometimes whole groups. Sometimes with music, with bags of chips, with large suitcases. Sometimes quiet, but still there, like a shadow pressed up against the house.

One of the longest apartment blocks stands just a few metres from our garden. No view, no depth and barely any sky. Just concrete and windows, rows of front doors opening and closing, voices echoing and sounds bouncing back with nowhere to go but toward you. It’s not just the physical presence of the building: it’s the life it holds. More than 30 direct neighbours behind us. Their conversations, their heels clicking on the gallery, their music tastes, their cooking smells, their parties and their renovations. Because someone is always renovating. Or moving. Or hammering, sanding, dragging or drilling. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes for months. It’s rarely quiet.

750 metres away, a railway line cuts through the landscape. Freight trains pass that you feel more than hear: deep vibrations. Sometimes one rolls by just as you try to rest. Sometimes you wake up because your body senses something approaching. And further out, but always felt, lie the A27, A12 and A2, which are not just any motorways, but the busiest in the country. You hear them like a hum beneath everything. Background noise that never truly fades into the background. Especially when the wind picks up or when it’s hot or very cold. Then everything presses in closer: sound, atmosphere and even smell.

And above us, as if all this wasn’t enough, the sky fills when the wind shifts. Planes flying low, headed to or from Schiphol. They come in waves. Sometimes you hear them before you see them. Sometimes you only see them once they’re almost overhead. And it’s not just the sound; it’s the realisation that even above your head there’s no quiet, no escape, no openness and no silence.

This is what I live with every single day. With a body that has no filter. With migraine attacks that explode inside my head from smells, from stress and from noise. With a nervous system that registers everything, stores everything and translates everything into tension. With a nose that picks up what others won’t notice until it’s too late. With a mind that fills faster than I can ever empty it.

And then people say: just go outside for a bit. But even the garden is no safe space. Because there too, you hear the traffic. You feel the buses rumble past. You smell the neighbour’s cigarette from down the street. You see people walking by on their way to the bus stop. Sometimes you look up and all you see is that apartment block: windows, faces, people who can see you, hear you and notice you.
There’s nowhere to retreat. Nowhere to catch your breath. No boundary between outside and inside. No quiet. Nowhere.

And that’s just the outside. The inside – we rarely speak of it.
But what happens in here, in this room, in this house, that’s where the quietest part of me lost its rest a long time ago.

We live here as the three of us: my partner, Fannar and me in my mother’s house, in my childhood bedroom, where nothing belongs to us except the bed we lie on, live on, rest on, eat on, dream on, despair on and make plans on; plans we often have to swallow down again because there’s no room for them: not literally, not emotionally, not in her rhythm, not in her house, not in what she can handle or control. So we shrink ourselves. We wait. We go quiet when things tip. We wait until she leaves, so we can do normal things like fill a kettle, cook, speak out loud, without everything shifting, becoming charged or heavy with something unspoken but always present. Like a smell, a glance, or a wall that was never built but still manages to stand between everything.

And that’s without the things she does say: the tone, the voice and the rules that change without warning, the ways she crosses our boundaries or twists them into something else, as if she doesn’t see that we’ve been running on empty for years – physically, emotionally, financially and that even this place that used to be my home is no longer a place of rest, but a construct of survival, a life shaped around avoidance, tension and self-erasure. Even her absence is something to factor in, because only then can we fetch water, clean, rest, have a moment where we’re not walking on eggshells, where Fannar doesn’t jump at her voice, where Mart doesn’t disappear into himself because it’s all too much again,
where I don’t feel every muscle tighten at the smallest disruption,
because even the tiniest sound comes in like a shock.

It doesn’t matter how much I rest at night, how much I try to relax, how much I push down, ignore or absorb. My system doesn’t recover. Because this environment doesn’t allow for that. Not for a day. Not an hour. Not a single second.

And then comes the thought: What if I hadn’t grown up here? Who would I have been? What would my body have felt like? How much could I have carried or maybe, how much would I have never had to carry?

We dream of a place in nature. Not because we’re romantic. Not because we’re naïve. Not because we’re chasing some adventure.
But because we can’t stay here, because this house no longer offers rest. Because this place doesn’t allow us to exist as we are.

We’re not asking for luxury – we’re asking for silence. For space. For air. For a place to live without being constantly interrupted.

We don’t want to run away. We just want to finally come home.