justin lesieur dot com slash blog slash finding solace in the silence

April 25, 2026

I lost both of my parents before my seventeenth birthday. There's no manual for that kind of grief. No roadmap for how to keep living when the people who are supposed to teach you how to do it are gone. I didn't know how to handle the attention, the questions, the pity. So I turned to humor and deflection, becoming a professional at masking. If I could make people laugh, they wouldn't ask if I was okay. And if they didn't ask, I didn't have to lie.

For most of my life, I filled every hour with noise. Work, people I thought were my friends, distractions. Anything to keep the quiet from settling in. Because when it did, things weren't good. Silence meant feeling, and I was never quite ready for that.

Alcohol became my way of keeping the volume up. It was easier to numb myself than to face reality. I pushed away the people who genuinely cared, the ones who wanted to help. I didn't want help. I wanted escape.

It took meeting the right person to change that. Someone who cared about my well-being, who didn't enable the drinking or the masking, who loved me enough to hold up a mirror and make me look. That person is my wife.

Through her, I learned that silence isn't the enemy. It's the space where healing begins. I quit drinking. I found peace and actual happiness. And it didn't happen until my mid-forties. 

If there's one thing I want anyone reading this to take away, it's that it is never too late to stop giving up on yourself. Sometimes, all it takes is changing the people you surround yourself with, or changing the place you call home. The quiet doesn't have to be terrifying. It can be the sound of your life finally coming together.