Why I Started Meditating (and Why I Almost Quit)

There is a specific kind of quiet that follows loss. Not peaceful quiet. Not the quiet of a still morning or a room after everyone has gone to bed. It is a heavy, disorienting quiet, the kind that makes ordinary sounds, a kettle boiling, a car passing outside, feel like they are coming from very far away.

That was the quiet I was living in when I first tried to meditate.

I had lost someone close to me. And in the weeks that followed, I was doing what a lot of grieving people do: functioning on the outside, falling apart on the inside. I was sleeping badly, eating without tasting anything, scrolling my phone at 2am not looking for anything in particular, just trying to fill the silence with noise.

A friend suggested I try meditating. I almost laughed.

The First Attempt (And How It Went Wrong)

I downloaded an app, found a quiet corner of my apartment, set a timer for ten minutes, and closed my eyes.

What followed was not peace. It was a flood. Every thought I had been outrunning came rushing in at once. Memories. Regrets. The particular cruelty of grief, which is that it does not arrive in a straight line but circles back, again and again, when you least expect it.

I opened my eyes after four minutes. I felt worse than when I started.

So I did what most people do. I decided meditation was not for me.

I told myself I was too restless. Too analytical. That some people were just wired for stillness and I was not one of them. I had heard people talk about meditation like it was this effortless, transformative thing and whatever I had just experienced in that corner of my apartment felt nothing like that.

I quit before I had really begun.

Why I Came Back

A few weeks later, still not sleeping, still carrying that weight around with me everywhere, I came across something that reframed the whole thing for me.

Meditation is not about emptying your mind. It never was.

That one idea stopped me in my tracks. Because everything I had read, everything I had assumed, was built on the idea that the goal was silence. A blank mind. No thoughts. And I had been failing at that goal spectacularly, so I assumed I was failing at meditation.

But the actual practice, the real thing, is not about achieving silence. It is about noticing. You notice a thought arise. You notice that you have wandered away from your breath or your body or whatever your anchor is. And then, without judgment, you return. That is the practice. The wandering and the returning. Over and over again.

Nobody told me that. And it changed everything.

What Finally Worked For Me

I came back to meditation through guided sessions. Not the silent timer kind. Actual voices, actual instruction, someone talking me through where to place my attention and what to do when my mind wandered, which it did, constantly, and which turned out to be completely fine.

Having a guide made the difference because it gave my analytical, restless mind something to do. Instead of sitting alone with the silence and losing the battle against my thoughts, I had a gentle anchor. A voice. A structure.

Slowly, something shifted.

Not dramatically. Not the way people describe it in podcasts, some sudden awakening or flood of clarity. It was quieter than that. One morning I noticed I had slept through the night. Another day I caught myself pausing before reacting to something that would normally have sent me spiraling. Small things. Ordinary things. But they felt significant.

Grief did not disappear. It never does. But I started to have somewhere to put it, even briefly. A few minutes each day where I was not running from it, but not drowning in it either. Just sitting with it, breathing through it, learning that I could feel it without being destroyed by it.

What I Want You to Know

If you have tried meditating and felt like you were doing it wrong, you were probably not doing it wrong. You were almost certainly doing exactly what every beginner does: expecting silence and getting noise, expecting calm and getting chaos.

The chaos is the practice. The fact that your mind wanders a hundred times in ten minutes does not mean you have failed. It means you are human, and you are learning, and every single time you notice the wandering and come back, you are building something real.

I started this space, Offline Zen, because I believe that the people who need meditation most are often the ones who feel least suited to it. The overthinkers. The grieving. The burnt out and the restless and the ones lying awake at 2am with their phones as their only company.

This is for you.

You do not need to be calm to begin. You just need to begin.