2. What Silence Sounds Like

 People often think silence is the absence of sound.

It isn't.

Silence has a voice of its own.

Sometimes it sounds like the sentence you rehearsed a hundred times but never spoke.

Sometimes it sounds like the message you typed, then deleted before pressing "Send."

Sometimes it sounds like a smile that arrives a little too quickly, hoping no one notices the storm behind it.

Silence is rarely empty. More often, it is crowded.

It carries conversations that never happened, apologies that were never received, questions that were never answered, and tears that were never allowed to fall. It remembers everything we asked it to hide.

For years, I believed silence was strength.

I thought that if I carried everything quietly enough, I would somehow protect the people around me. I convinced myself that speaking about pain would only make it heavier, so I became very good at pretending. I answered "I'm fine" with remarkable fluency. I laughed at the right moments. I showed up. I disappeared only where no one could see me.

From the outside, silence looked like resilience.

From the inside, it was exhaustion.

There is a loneliness that comes from feeling misunderstood.

There is another kind that comes from never allowing yourself to be understood at all.

The second is quieter.

It teaches you to translate every emotion before anyone else can see it. It asks you to become your own editor, deleting the difficult sentences before they ever reach another human being.

Eventually, you forget what your own unedited voice sounds like.

That is one of the quiet tragedies of silence.

Not that it hides us from the world.

But that it slowly begins to hide us from ourselves.

Writing became the first place where I stopped editing my existence.

The page never asked me to simplify what I was feeling. It never demanded that I explain my pain in a way that made other people comfortable. It allowed contradictions to live beside one another. It accepted fear without asking for courage, grief without requiring hope, and questions without insisting on answers.

For the first time, silence had somewhere to go besides deeper into me.

I still believe there is value in quiet.

Not every thought needs to become a speech.

Not every wound needs an audience.

But there is an important difference between choosing silence and being imprisoned by it.

One is peace.

The other is survival.

Learning that difference changed my life.

Perhaps that is why I continue writing.

Not because I have escaped silence, but because I have finally learned to listen to what it has been trying to tell me all along.

Sometimes silence is asking to be respected.

Sometimes it is asking to be broken.

Knowing which one is which may be one of the most difficult lessons we ever learn.

If you are carrying a silence of your own, I hope you know this:

You do not have to break it all at once.

You do not have to explain every chapter of your life.

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is speak one honest sentence.

Sometimes that sentence is spoken aloud.

Sometimes it is written on a page that no one else will ever read.

Both are beginnings.

— Jean T. Hatoum

Author of I Wrote So I Would Not Fade and J’ai Écrit Pour Ne Pas M’effacer

Thank you for giving my silence a place to land.

If these words felt like home, the rest of the map is in the book.

And if you are able to, supporting my journey helps me afford the medication that keeps my own fractured ember burning.

http://linktr.ee/Jean.Hatoum

I’m not finished surviving out loud. 🕊️



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