After the Fast: The Unsettled Space That Followed
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
When I finished my 14-day water fast, I expected to come out of it with clarity. I thought that after that kind of stillness...fourteen days of removing distractions, simplifying life, and spending intentional time in prayer and reflection, I would return to my normal routine with a clear sense of direction. I assumed I would know what was next, what decisions to make, and how everything in my life was supposed to fit together.
But that’s not what happened.
What I walked back into wasn’t clarity. It was something much more uncomfortable than that.
It was space.
In the days immediately following the fast, life on the outside looked normal again. I was back in conversations, spending time with people, moving through my schedule. But internally, something felt off. Not wrong, just… unsettled.
The quiet I had experienced during the fast didn’t disappear, but instead of bringing answers, it seemed to create more room for my thoughts to expand. My mind, which had been softened during those fourteen days, started to come back online—and when it did, it didn’t come back quietly.
If anything, it came back stronger.
I found myself thinking more, not less. Processing more, not less. Replaying conversations, questioning decisions, trying to understand my relationships, and wondering what everything meant. It felt like my brain was trying to make up for lost time, as if it believed its job was to take all of that space and fill it with answers.
And I let it.
For most of my life, that’s how I’ve operated.
If something didn’t feel right, I would think about it. If something felt uncertain, I would try to solve it. If something was unclear, I would analyze it from every angle until I could land on an answer that gave me some sense of peace.
I truly believed that if I could just think long enough, I would eventually figure my life out.
So in those days after the fast, that’s exactly what I tried to do.
I leaned into the thinking. I tried to process everything that had come up during those fourteen days. I looked at my life, my relationships, my future, and asked myself over and over again, What does this mean? What should I do? What is the right next step?
But instead of bringing clarity, it did something else.
It made me tired.
There was a moment—I can’t point to the exact day—but I remember noticing it clearly.
All of that thinking wasn’t helping.
It wasn’t bringing peace. It wasn’t bringing answers. It was just continuing a pattern I had lived in for years, one where I believed that if I could just understand everything, I would finally feel settled.
But I didn’t feel settled.
I felt exhausted.
At the same time, something quieter was happening underneath all of that.
Even though my mind was active, there were moments—small ones—where I would step out of it. Moments where I wasn’t analyzing or solving anything. I would be sitting with someone, or going about my day, and for a brief second, everything felt… still.
Nothing had been figured out. Nothing had been resolved. And yet, in those moments, I felt okay.
That’s when I began to realize something I hadn’t seen before.
Peace wasn’t showing up when I figured things out.
It was showing up in the moments when I stopped trying to.
That realization didn’t come all at once, and it didn’t immediately change my behavior. My mind still went back to its old patterns. It still tried to take control, to solve, to understand. But now there was a small gap—a moment of awareness where I could see what was happening instead of automatically following it.
And in that space, a different question began to form.
What if I didn’t need to figure everything out?
What if the constant thinking wasn’t the path to peace, but the very thing keeping me from it?
Around that same time, I also began to notice how much input I had been taking in for years.
Books, podcasts, conversations, teachings—I’ve always been someone who wants to grow, to learn, to understand more. And while those things are good, I started to see that even in my growth, I was still doing something very similar to what I had always done.
I was still consuming. Still processing. Still trying to move forward.
There was always something to read, something to listen to, something to think about.
And for the first time, I questioned whether that was actually helping me.
The more I sat with it, the more it became clear.
I didn’t need more insight.
I needed less input.
Not just from the outside, but from the constant internal processing as well. I had spent so much of my life trying to think my way into peace that I didn’t know what it felt like to simply be without trying to understand everything.
What I needed wasn’t another breakthrough.
I needed a full detox from processing itself.
That realization didn’t feel like a big, exciting moment.
It felt quiet. Almost subtle.
But it was also very clear.
If I truly wanted something different—if I wanted to experience peace in a way that wasn’t dependent on figuring everything out—then I would have to create space not just from the noise around me, but from the noise within me as well.
At the same time, my days were becoming simpler.
I found myself enjoying small, ordinary moments—time with people, quiet conversations, just being present—without needing them to mean something more. I wasn’t constantly asking what I should be doing next or what everything was leading to.
And while part of me still felt unsettled, another part of me began to soften.
For the first time, I could see the possibility that life wasn’t something I needed to solve.
It was something I could simply experience.
I didn’t have a clear plan at the end of those two weeks.
I didn’t have answers about my future or certainty about my next steps.
But I did have something different.
I had the awareness that the way I had been living—constantly thinking, processing, and trying to figure everything out—wasn’t actually bringing me the peace I had been searching for.
And I had a growing desire to step even further away from that pattern.
Not to escape my life, but to finally experience it without trying to control or define every part of it.
I didn’t know exactly what that would look like yet.
But I knew this:
If I really wanted to hear God’s voice more clearly, I was going to need to create space where nothing else was speaking.
For those who are walking a similar season, I've included links below to a few earlier reflections that helped shape this journey:
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