The Silence is Screaming

I can’t ignore it anymore

Photo by Jessica Favaro on Unsplash

If I’m honest, I have several negative associations with silence. In early childhood, silence was a punishment — an admonishment to be seen and not heard. On playgrounds, it was a weapon. Friends could become enemies with the power to render you invisible by pretending that they could not hear you. In romantic relationships, silence was rejection, a cold shoulder, and a punishment for somehow being disappointing.

And then I learned there could be an even worse silence. A silence of things left unsaid and promises broken. Silence heavy with grief and betrayal. Silence could break you — or at least, silence could break me.

I learned to hate it. I would fill the void with music, words, or a well-timed joke to lighten the mood. Or I could ignore it by going into my head — living in a rich fantasy world where the real one might have been silent but seemed so much more distant than the one in my mind.

Then, there was the silence of depression when everything inside my head didn’t screech to a stop. Rather, it slowly dissolved, leaving an endless expanse of emptiness and nothing — a silence worse than all the others.

I know my way around silence, but never before has it seemed to shout the way it’s doing now. This is something new — the silence of people who see…