More Space Same Silence
When more isn't enough.
In 2016, I moved out of my tiny rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in West Harlem. A 1940s-era walkup. The fifth floor—twenty steps per flight. I counted them on the way up, sometimes out of exhaustion, sometimes because it made the climb feel shorter.
Two blocks east of the Hudson River. On the first floor sat a bodega, a beauty salon, and a barbershop.
It wasn’t the prettiest building. It wasn’t the quietest block. But every morning, the sunrise rose over the East River and poured through my windows. My bed faced the light, and the sun often woke me before my alarm.
I lived in that apartment for ten years. My first New York crib without roommates. That small space held an entire decade of my life.
If the walls could talk, they wouldn’t whisper. They would testify.
There were losses inside those rooms. Long nights. Difficult phone conversations. The end of a romantic relationship, sitting on the very couch I had spent months saving for—the piece that made that small apartment feel like something permanent. But there were good days too. I perfected boeuf bourguignon and Patti LaBelle’s peach cobbler. I carried furniture up and down those same five flights of stairs until the place felt like mine.
It was small. But it felt full.
New York was a long way from Oakland, California, where I grew up. And somewhere between comfort and accomplishment, I began to feel a quiet emptiness—a sadness I couldn’t quite shake. Something that didn’t seem tied to the space itself, yet somehow echoed within it.
So I moved.
Back West. Closer to family. Closer to friends who had known me for decades. I settled in Las Vegas, in a spacious townhome inside a gated community. Two-car garage. Washer and dryer. Patio. More room than I knew what to do with after living in Harlem.
In this world, we’re conditioned to believe bigger is better. More is preferred. New is better than old. We upgrade apartments. We upgrade vehicles. We upgrade furniture. We upgrade cities. We assume expansion equals improvement.
But sometimes you move into a larger room and find yourself walking in the same quiet circles.
We try to fill empty spaces with things. Sometimes they’re tangible. Sometimes they’re spiritual. Sometimes they’re people. Sometimes they’re distractions dressed up as growth.
For a while, it feels like progress.
And then one day you realize: the emptiness you felt when you had less still lingers when you have more.
The address changed. The floor plan expanded. The closets were bigger. However, the silence remains the same. Sometimes louder.
What I’m learning in my more mature years is that more isn’t always better. Bigger isn’t always better. The space we’re trying to fill is rarely physical.
Often, it’s the absence of peace.
And when peace finally settles in—when you stop chasing more and start accepting where you are—even the smallest room begins to feel expansive.