Protecting Your Peace

Kate Chung

There’s a common misconception that peace is the absence of noise. But it's actually the opposite. Peace is the hum beneath your ribs, the rhythm that reminds you that even in chaos, there is something inside of you that is steady and cannot be shaken. A flow untouchable to anyone but you.

Still, even the strongest rhythms can be drowned out by too much noise. Not every presence will honor your calm, and not every relationship will leave space for it to breathe. Protecting your peace is simply turning down the volume of discord in order to hear the hum again.

Imagine a house. Not a fortress, but a place where you rest, live, and can welcome others into. To protect your peace is to nurture your home. Yes, it may be strong, but under certain circumstances, any house can clutter, and any home can crumble. Certain visitors will break vases, and others will fill them with flowers. As the homeowner, it is your responsibility to decide who will be invited back. But to defend your home isn’t to cut away relationships the moment they become difficult. There is a stark difference between protecting your heart and hardening it. It’s about staying grounded in who you are, no matter how loud the world gets. Peace is not passive, it is a consistent choice, something you need to choose again, and again, even when it would be easier not to. 

Although there will always be those who test your peace, not every challenge is a threat to your well being. Certain relationships and circumstances are meant to stretch you. Working through discomfort requires resilience and understanding, and these will strengthen your character and future connections. However, confusing resilience with enduring toxicity is an easy mistake to make. There is a fine line between a stretch worth enduring and a stretch intending to wear you down. 

A close friend once said something that stuck with me: You don’t have to stay around people who make you feel unloved; and this is true. Defending your heart can look like many things, and surrounding yourself with a community who sincerely cares for you is one of them. Prioritizing valuable relationships is healthy, and letting go of damaging bonds is a part of that. You have the power to remove yourself from situations where you feel unvalued, not out of spite or defeat, but out of self-respect. 

But backing out of connections is not always the right solution. Peace isn’t meant to be lonely, because life isn’t meant to be lived alone. Yes, isolation can feel soothing for some time, but it will slowly and painfully eat away at relationships of value. The goal isn’t to build a life where no one can reach you, it’s to build one where the right people can stay. 

Peace takes work. At times, it takes messy conversations, tears, apologies and persistent effort. It takes caring enough about a person to be honest with them, and loving yourself enough to know when to rest. Your peace is important, and so are the people who add to it. Which begs the question: who are you letting into your home?