Written October 2022, Zakopane, Poland
“Children who grew up in chaos become adults who are triggered by peace.”
I came across this quote once, and it made me laugh—not because it wasn’t true, but because it felt all too familiar. For much of my life, chaos wasn’t just a passing phase; it was permanent. My mother was an active volcano that frequently erupted, leaving me charred and scared. Her moods were a storm I couldn’t predict, a clash of forces I later learned to call bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. What I did understand was the wild look in her eyes, the plates smashing against the kitchen floor, my silent, salty gasps, clutching my knees on the cold toilet seat, hoping the storm wouldn’t find me there.
As a child, I learned how to shrink myself—to soften my footsteps, lower my voice, and disappear into the corners of the house. Peace wasn’t something I believed in; life taught me, over and over, that it was fragile—always waiting to be shattered.
When Peace Feels Like Danger
So, here’s the thing: It’s not that I don’t want to linger in peace. It’s that I don’t quite know how. Calm can feel foreign. When life slows down, my chest tightens. I’m scanning, waiting for the next disruption. After years of living in chaos, calm feels like a vulnerability. My brain, conditioned by survival mode, doesn’t recognize stillness as safety. Instead, it whispers: How long will this last?
And here’s the kicker—when the inevitable disruption comes, there’s a strange kind of relief. Ah, there it is. The chaos feels familiar, almost comforting in its predictability. If nothing happens, I create my own storm. Speaking of which—naturally, I just booked a one-way ticket to the Pacific Ocean.
I wasn’t always aware of the patterns. For years, I thought my restlessness was part of who I was: someone who thrived in turbulence, who found stillness stifling, who couldn’t stop running. But my restlessness isn’t a personality trait; it’s a survival mechanism. My nervous system was stuck in a loop of freeze, flight, fight, and fawn for so long that I didn’t even realize I was living like this. My internal alarms rang so often they became background noise, something I had to tune out just to function.
Even now, the echoes of that chaos linger. When someone yells or even raises their voice, my body reacts as though my mother is in the room. My heart races. My stomach knots. That old, familiar urge to disappear takes over. This is what trauma does. The amygdala—the fear center of the brain—doesn’t understand time. It reacts to perceived threats as though the past is still happening, as though the danger is still right here. My body still remembers what my mind has tried to forget.
The Addictiveness of Chaos
But chaos doesn’t just hurt — it hooks you. There’s a strange kind of comfort in the whirlwind. It’s familiar, and familiarity can feel safe, even when it’s destructive. When you grow up with your adrenaline constantly spiked, calm feels more threatening than turbulence.
This is partly biology. When life is unpredictable, the brain releases dopamine in bursts—small hits of reward, especially when a crisis resolves. Over time, the highs, and lows of chaos condition your brain to crave disruption. It’s like an addiction to instability. Looking back, I see how I fed this pattern. I sought out situations that brought both excitement and risk, throwing myself into change before I could even settle into stillness.
For years, I lived pretty recklessly, clinging to a nihilistic belief that nothing mattered. Life felt like something that happened to me, not something I had control over. And yet, there’s a part of me that’s grateful for that recklessness. It gave me the courage to do things most people wouldn’t. To leave. To travel alone. To throw myself into the unknown, again and again. Paradoxically, it was through that chaos that I began to reclaim my agency.
When you’re on your own in a foreign place, every choice becomes yours: where to go, where to sleep, what to eat. Little by little, I started to feel like my life was mine again.
Rewiring the Brain
For the longest time, I thought my restlessness was just who I was: someone who thrived on turbulence, someone who always needed to be productive, someone who felt guilty for resting. But I’ve since learned that it wasn’t me—it was my nervous system, fried from years of living on high alert.
Trauma rewires the brain in ways that are both devastating and, strangely, hopeful. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational thinking and emotional regulation, becomes less active, making it harder to feel grounded. The amygdala, overactive and hypervigilant, keeps us in a state of constant unease. And then there’s dopamine dysregulation, the chemical pull that makes chaos addictive. It’s a cocktail of dysfunction, and I was sculling it for years.
But the hopeful part of it all? The brain has an extraordinary ability to heal itself. Through a process called neuroplasticity, it can adapt and change, forming new pathways that allow us to embrace calm instead of fearing it. Albert Einstein once said, “In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.” I didn’t see it at the time, but healing is just that—an opportunity to meet yourself. I’ve spent years peeling back the layers shaped by survival and learning to hold compassion for the parts of me that still flinch at loud voices or brace for storms that never comes. It’s a slow and sometimes messy process, but it’s possible.
Chaos as a Teacher
Chaos, for all its pain, has been one of my greatest teachers. Psychologists call this post-traumatic growth: the idea that enduring hardship can lead to profound personal change. I’ve seen this in myself. The times I’ve felt most broken, most lost, are the times I’ve emerged stronger, closer to the truest version of myself. Losing yourself, it turns out, is sometimes the only way to find yourself.
There’s even a kind of beauty in chaos. Chaos Theory teaches us that systems that appear random often have hidden patterns and structures. Life mirrors this. The turbulence that feels meaningless in the moment can lead to growth and understanding later on. Like the butterfly effect, small shifts—choosing to stay, choosing to breathe—can create ripple effects that transform everything.
Finding the Calm Within
The journey isn’t over. I still carry triggers, and I still find myself bracing for disruptions even when there’s no storm on the horizon. But I’m learning to trust the stillness, to let it settle into my bones instead of pushing it away.
Maybe peace and chaos aren’t opposites. Maybe they’re two sides of the same coin. Chaos has taught me resilience, but peace is teaching me compassion—for myself, for my journey, for the ways I’m still learning.
Every disruption, every mistake, and every moment of being tossed around by life has shaped me into someone closer to my truth. I’m beginning to see that peace doesn’t have to look like a perfectly quiet life. It’s not about silencing the winds outside but finding the calm within.
And maybe, just maybe, I can let life be wild and beautiful while learning to anchor myself, no matter where the storm takes me.
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