I Quit Music, Movies and Novels for a Year.

If you want to hear yourself, get rid of external noise.

I quit listening to most types of music (except for classical), reading novels, and watching movies for a little more than one year.

The reason was to stop allowing in external narratives and make room for my own to form.

If you want to hear yourself, get rid of external noise.

The potential of empty spaces

In his book, The Way of Zen, Alan Watts writes about the value and potential of empty spaces.

An empty page allows one to write words on it, an empty jar can be filled up with rice, a hole in the wall — a window — lets the light into the room, and through an empty pipe, water can flow freely.

There’s an under-appreciated value in empty spaces.

This value lies in the actions which such a space enables.

Analogically, what you perceive to be an empty space in your mind, enables the potential for growth, expansion, and self-discovery.

If you claim (or think) that your jar is full or your page is completely covered in writing, you wouldn’t be able to make any more use of it.

Even if you think you know a lot already, there is always more to learn or discover. So it’s better not to let yourself fall into the trap of omniscience.

And so the space I created by getting rid of external narratives allowed me to realise the natural intensity of my own emotions, my methods of dealing with them, and my ways of seeing the world, love, and friendships.

It was a crucial period in my long recovery from depression and the general “homecoming” — understanding myself better and gaining the courage to act in alignment with my needs and worldview.

Weaving an inner narrative

I was raised by books. They were like my second parents, who taught me about the passion of love and showed me what true “never-or-forever” friendships should be like. From their pages, I learned that if you suffer, you should be doing it totally, without any limits.

I was absorbing the characters and stories that books carried and tried them on in my life, like clothes.

When I wasn’t occupied by literature, I would listen to music all the time. I used to take pride in how much I couldn’t bear an empty space of an undistilled moment and how I’d always have to carry something to read or listen to. I thought it made me an interesting, well-read, cultural person, and that those who didn’t do it were boring or lazy.

And like that, pulling out threads from fictional worlds throughout the years, and never allowing myself to just be, I weaved an inner narrative that oversaturated all my thoughts.

Everything that kills me makes me feel alive.

Literature and music are an incredible way to visit other worlds and other lives from any chosen location without moving.

They tell us stories meant to absorb us; and while we love them so much for precisely that, we seem not to realise one very important thing: that art is a dump hole for unprocessed emotions.

People — artists, who create stories, often use them to cope with their own traumas or emotional struggles.

They pour their souls into art, and that’s what makes it so touching. But through this, they project their unprocessed emotions onto us.

This is the well-known healing process of expressing your own emotions through art.

Of course, there are positive books and songs. However, we tend to avoid them at all costs when we feel down and instead surround ourselves with narratives that lead us to even darker places than those created by our minds. Oh, sweet masochism.

I’m far from claiming that novels, movies, and love songs should be avoided altogether. I’d have to be delusional to say that.

However, I think it’s very important to be mindful while using them and know when to stop.

It’s easy to get carried away and adopt the idea that true love happens only once in a lifetime and that somewhere out there is “the one” meant for us. And if we happen to think that our ex was that person, then, well, our whole life goes through the window (hopefully not literally).

Just because Romeo and Juliet quit the game, unable to see past their “beautiful, one-in-the-lifetime” romance, doesn’t mean you have to do the same. Or that this is the right way of coping in any way.

Just because someone in the song is talking about suicide or chooses to be miserable for the rest of their life because they can’t stand the pain of the lost love, you should only feel compassion for them that they didn’t find professional help (therapy). Don’t follow their lead, suffering triple as much as you would without submerging yourself in this narrative.

It’s not a novel observation that most romantic songs, literature, and movies talk about love that didn’t go well. Broken hearts have the most to say about love, while hearts full of it are too busy in their state to share their stories.

I, too, noticed that I wrote more and in more detail when I felt down — when my heart was sore, and I needed an outlet for all of these overflowing emotions.

Another truth about art is that it has an intrinsic ability to convey emotions omitting the intellectual sphere. In other words, it speaks straight to our emotional layer without the need for intellectual processing (filtration).

That is both great and dangerous.

The great part is what makes us love the art — we feel understood and seen. It enables us to communicate to others what words can’t possibly encompass.

Art is the universal language through which we can connect on the most fundamental level — without terminologies and boundaries. It offers a medium for genuine human-to-human or human-to-world connection.

But the dangerous aspect of it is, frankly, still the same as what makes us love art.

It bypasses our intellectual filtration system.

So whatever emotion the author had interwoven into the tissue of the art piece at the moment of creation goes straight to us, in its raw, unprocessed form.

We are naturally programmed to detect and synthesise the emotional states of other humans. It’s called compassion and empathy. How much we take in depends on our individual predispositions or skill, but the bottom line is that we all work this way — and it happens unconsciously.

Now, why can it be a problem? I mean, it sounds like straight-up most basic human behaviour. Why could it possibly be bad?

The problem is that in order to convey a message in a clear way through art, the carrier of the message (narrative) needs to be emphasised and often exaggerated to fulfil its role.

That means the ways in which emotions or coping methods are depicted in movies, books or songs, aren’t necessarily equal to how it typically looks in life. They are exaggerated and twisted to make the plot more exciting.

We usually know this on an intellectual level. Still, since a big chunk of those narratives gets to us bypassing our logical and critical thinking, it integrates with our unconscious and influences our operational system.

We’ve been fed this soup of narratives from day 0.

That’s why we no longer know our natural ways of interacting with the world. We forget how we’d process emotions based only on our most fundamental human self-regulatory system because we don’t know how to stop telling ourselves stories.

It’s unclear to which extent we act the way we do because this is what the situation calls for or because we think we should be a certain way based on the narratives we’ve been fed since we were able to compute language and motion picture.

We stay in this illusion because nearly everyone around us has the same background, so breaking out from it borders on social exclusion.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

The endearing nature of us — humans — is that it is twisted.

We think that if we suffer to the core, it somehow makes us feel that we’re “alive”, that we have raw deep emotions, and that the love we had was true.

But (this might be shocking) you don’t need to suffer to know what you experienced was true.

When I was dumped, I thought that if I tried to get over it quickly, it’d mean that the whole relationship meant nothing to me. So I bathed in my own misery to prove to myself and others how much I cared.

But the truth, which I came to understand a few breakups later, is exactly the opposite.

Getting over a painful situation seemingly fast is actually more courageous and genuine than opening your wounds repeatedly just to let your blood be seen (of course, if it’s in alignment with me and doesn’t mean suppressing any emotions).

The relationship meant so much to me, and I gave so much love to it that the pain of losing it was incredibly severe. So severe that I couldn’t afford for it to last longer than absolutely necessary.

Choosing to deal with this pain faster doesn’t mean we didn’t care. It often means we cared so much that we had to deal with the leftover sorrow as soon as possible, simply to stay alive (or sane).

Another thing I realised that motivated me to do the “cultural detox” is that I was romanticising relationships and love a lot. Still, I had a deep underlying feeling that perhaps it was unhealthy, and perhaps it gave me more suffering than necessary (yes, the romanticised, glorified suffering).

It took me a while to take apart the belief that romantic actions equal love, or rather, healthy love. And that drama isn’t an indicator that the other person cares.

I had to allow the empty space in my mind to eventually get to the understanding of how I want to go about relationships, what love means to me, what partnership means to me, what my non-negotiables are, how I process emotions, how much I’m willing to extend myself to meet another person where they are, and when too much is too much.

Of course, escaping all external influences and narratives is impossible. What you perceive will always be a sum of what you let in, or as Epictetus said:

You become what you give your attention to.

But it’s crucial to be aware of the influence those narratives have over us.

Each of us should create a skill of checking in with ourselves and keep polishing the courage to go against the status quo if that means staying in alignment with what’s ultimately best for us.

A trace of self-awareness over ignorance is the first step to freedom.

The action made possible by empty space

Life isn’t all about romantic actions and sacrificing yourself for love, as some novels, movies and songs might paint it.

As beautiful as it may sound, love isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal of our existence. We can and should learn how to create purpose in our lives that isn’t so easily taken away by a single person.

If love is your main goal (which is wonderful), start by loving yourself.

You can’t fathom what true love feels like if you don’t give it to yourself first. You must understand your ways of loving before you can genuinely give it to others. You must see what kind of love you need so you don’t accept the love that might hurt you more than warm you up.

Only then can you build a healthy relationship based on mutual respect, trust, friendship, emotional intelligence, humour and Love.

And only then can you stay true to yourself.

In order to avoid distraction in the flow of this story, I decided to include the authors of some of the quotes I used as mid-titles at the end:

Everything that kills me makes me feel alive. — One Republic, Counting Stars

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. — Aristotle

Before you go

I’m Justyna Cyrankiewicz, and I write about simple things that make overcomplicated minds.

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P.S. Please note that this story is based on my personal experience, the books I’ve read, and the teachings I have received. Don’t follow online advice if your mental health is severely at risk; reach out to friends, professionals, and other groups to gain relevant support for your particular situation.

Thank you for being here.