What happens when you can't run from yourself anymore

There was a time Devin A Giordano would do anything to avoid being alone with his thoughts. Noise, motion, distraction — whatever it took to stay one step ahead of himself.

Then he went to prison. And the world, for the first time, stopped moving.

No phone to check. No errand to run. No conversation to duck into. Just a cell, a silence, and a mind that had nowhere left to hide.

At first it was unbearable. He describes it almost like withdrawal — the itch to escape, the panic of empty hours. He'd spent years treating stillness like a threat. Now it was the only thing on the menu.

But something shifted. Without the usual noise to drown things out, he started actually listening to himself — the fears, the regrets, the voice he'd been running from since he was a kid. It turns out that voice wasn't an enemy. It just wanted to be heard.

Slowly, solitude stopped feeling like punishment and started feeling like company. He learned to sit with his own mind the way you'd sit with an old friend — patiently, without needing to fix anything. The stillness that once terrified him became the place where he finally met himself.

It's a strange gift, prison teaching a man how to be alone. But maybe that's the trick hiding in plain sight for the rest of us too: the running was never about the destination. It was about avoiding the quiet. And the quiet, it turns out, is where the good stuff lives.

Distilled from Psyche