The Podcastless Month officially concluded on 4.20—I went cold turkey on 3.20, just 3 days before my 30th birthday, deleting my podcast app to remove temptation. The first few days were the hardest, partially because they slammed into the existential crisis of how to celebrate my birthday. I looked at it like an experiment, to see what would happen to my thoughts and feelings. Even in the midst of pod withdrawals, I knew it was the right thing to do. I’d grown accustomed to filling my days with other people’s voices, gradually feeding my time to a one-sided relationship. No podcaster knows who I am, but I knew so much about them and all the people they deemed important.
I have to shout out Audrey Wood of Natura Human for inspiring me to take on this experiment. She texted me halfway through March, reporting that she was taking a month off IG, partially because of the message I’d written for March in the Now is Good calendar:
This felt like a mirror that Past Me had put in place for Present Me. If Audrey was taking these words seriously, shouldn’t I?
Fast forward to today and I have yet to re-download the podcast app. I don’t even feel interested in diving back into that world. I realized when I was listening to podcasts, I’d started feeling anxious or not in my body when an episode ended. It was like…okay time to be silent? What does that mean? Who’s in there?
I’ve never been someone with general anxiety, it’s not my baseline. I’ve always felt really lucky that my body doesn’t process stress that way, because I know anxiety can be so consuming. When I quit podcasts I was prepared for a new version of myself where constant anxiety was a new reality I had to confront.