silence

What Do You Think Would Happen?

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What do you think would happen
If I stopped restraining my tongue
And voiced my inner thoughts aloud:
­             If I put aside all the careful filters
             And ignored all sensible precaution,
             Telling everyone who can hear
             What I felt or thought
             Instead of what I knew
             Was the correct thing to say?

Would people know the difference
Or am I the only one who spends
Most of my time in silence,
­­             Weighing every little word
­­             On a set of scales
­­             I’ve spent my life constructing
­             To be fair and just to all?

Would anyone but me even care
Beyond the initial shock
Of a direct response
In a culture that values
Hidden agendas and vague
References to minutiae?

If I told you what first ran through my mind
When you told me your story,
Would you have listened to me?
­             Or would I still have to spend time
­             Learning to phrase things so your mind listens
­             Even when your ears refuse to?

If I spoke more truthfully of my mind,
Would you value my silence less
And decide to come to me for more
Than just the slice of my truth you need
­             Or would you learn to value my truth less
­             Because I was dispensing it
­             To anyone who was near enough to take it?

If I stopped restraining my tongue
And voiced my inner thoughts aloud,
­             Would people finally hear me
­­­­             Instead of just the words I say?

 

The Choice Between Silence and Speaking up can be Imposing

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One of my most important habits, in terms of maintaining my mental health, is taking moments throughout the day to be quiet. I take them during breaks, if I’m feeling particularly frustrated, when new work comes piling in, when something goes wrong, when I need to talk to someone who pushes my buttons, and when I need time to clear my thoughts. They’re an integral part of my ability to cope with the mess in my head and the stress of the world around me. It is hard to get at work, but nothing is quite as calming to me as a few moments of silence. When I get home from work after a stressful day, when things are pushing me to my limit, or when I’m trying to sort through a tangled mess of emotions in order to share how I’m feeling, silence is the foundation from which I respond as needed.

There are other times I like silence as well, beyond as an aid to my coping mechanisms or emotional needs. Sharing a few moments of silence with my friends is a great way to get comfortable being around each other. A silent moment with my partner lets me feel more connected and appreciate the moment we’re in. Silence when having a deep conversation lets me take a moment to appreciate what has been said and how I want to contribute. Silence as I go to sleep helps me feel calm and at peace so I can dodge the anxiety cannon in my head that’s waiting for a single spark of a thought to go off. Silence is important to me, as you can probably tell given how often I write about it.

All of those are just times it came up as a major theme or the subject of something I’ve written and posted on this blog. If I spent more time, I could probably find enough references to make each work in the sentence a different link. If I included stuff I haven’t shared, I could probably do that for the entire paragraph.

That being said, not all of those references are to times where silence was a good thing. As much as I enjoy silence, I cannot deny that I have a complicated relationship with it. Being silent because I want peace is one thing, being silent because I feel like I have nothing to say or that I can’t find the right words is something else entirely. This whole blog started with a post about needing to speak up more and to make sure I didn’t lose my voice to choosing silence over speaking all the time. Imposing silence on myself and having it imposed on me by others is a sure-fire way to get me all fired up in one way or another. If I’m doing it to myself, I’ll get a little angry but mostly sad because I’m struggling to fight a habit that has been a part of me for most of my life. If someone else is trying to silence me, I’ll get incredibly angry and will struggle with the desire to make noise simply to spite them.

Choosing to be silent and imposing silence on yourself are two different things. I often choose to be silent in meetings because, while I could affirm the point someone is making or add another data point to the general consensus, me speaking up adds nothing because the point has already been made or the person has already been convinced. I often impose silence on myself when someone says or does something that upsets me because I don’t have the emotional energy to get into a discussion with them or because I just want to move on without making a big deal of what happened. You could say that I’m choosing to remain silent in both situations, but only in the second one do I have something I want to say that will possibly bother me in the future as a result of not saying it. Ultimately, the distinction is only meaningful here because I’m giving it meaning. Other people can define it however they want and give it whatever emotional weight they want, but that is the difference in my eyes.

The problem with such a hair-splitting distinction is that I often struggle to tell which is which in certain situations. Sure, maybe staying silent after my friend says something careless that hurts my feelings is “choosing” silence, but it often feels like “imposing” silence in the moment. I can only really tell after the fact and then, sometimes, it is too late to choose anything else. I don’t like the idea of bringing up stuff from the past, but deciding to watch out for it in the future and preparing to speak out then can create a barrier between you and whoever you’re preparing for. Additionally, it gets harder and harder to speak up the longer you remain silent. Silence in the face of something is often seen as approval and can be widely interpreted by whoever is watching. I’ve had people in the past blow up at me because I was silent a couple of times before bringing something up with them. One of them routinely used it as a way to change the subject and avoid whatever problem I was trying to address by steering the conversation from there using their outrage and anger at what they called an ambush to browbeat me into letting go.

Silence is dangerous. It is addicting and can be used against you. I used to believe that saving my words at my previous job would mean people would take note when I eventually spoke. Turns out that all it accomplished was to get people used to ignoring me. I’m pretty sure my habit of not talking during meetings when I didn’t have anything to actually add to the meeting is what held me back in my manager’s reviews of my performance. Start staying silent when you think you should be speaking up and it becomes easier to justify it in the future. Not necessarily because of the “slippery” slope idea, but because you’ve already done the work of justifying it once. It takes less work after that. Sometimes, in order to combat part of it, you need to create a whole new blog based around the idea of speaking up and, when that obviously didn’t help the way you wanted, commit to updating it every day for a year.

That’s an extreme example, sure, but it’s one I have personal experience with. Even then, it hasn’t helped as much as I wanted it to. I’m still silent most of the time. I hold back and think and then the moment has passed and I feel like saying anything is only going to even more of a disruption than what I wanted to say might have been. Except in writing. On my blog I am honest, I hold very little back (because I don’t want EVERYTHING on the internet for anyone to find), and I feel like I can express myself easily. Half the time, I consider writing a post about how I feel and then sending a link to the relevant parties so they can finally get to hear what I think about something. At the same time, since very few of the people I’m closest to actually read this blog, it’s a pretty safe place to write something without needing to worry about upsetting someone who only has half the picture.

That being said, I’m willing to bet that everyone I’m close to is going to wind up reading this post and having something to say about that. Typical.

Silence can be good. Silence can be wonderful! But it can also be dangerous and you can drown in it. Finding the balance between speaking up at the right times and staying silent when it is a choice is one of the things I need to work on. Even though the list is getting huge, I think I can manage it. I’ve got everything written down in a little notebook using a system I created just for this purpose. Hopefully, I can keep track of everything this way and, between my own efforts and my occasional therapy sessions, work my way through it.

That’d be a nice accomplishment for this decade. I’d like to say “2018,” but setting goals is all about making sure they’re reasonable. I’m pretty sure I’m going to need more than another six months to work through all of this.

Dreams

Chris 1 Comment

My dreams are a dark unknown abyss
That always deny me restful bliss
As I try to sleep and only miss
Each and every attempt to end this
String of nights forever gone amiss.

My dreams often lose their frightful sheen
When they are so few and far between
I forget the horror I have seen
And eagerly await the next scene
Of whatever story I am keen
To introduce into my routine.

My dreams aren’t sweet, ephemeral things
Tied to secret hopes by hidden strings
But scaly monsters replete with wings
Moving in silence so loud it rings.

My dreams have no blood and guts and gore,
They have something even worse in store
As I toil through my nightly chore
Of knocking on the dark, horrid doors
Of my mind to find what it fears more
Than any monster to wash ashore.

My Voice

Chris 1 Comment

My voice can fade from lack of use.

My neck is caught up in a noose
Built according to my own design.
There never was a loop so malign
As the fears so doggedly adverse
And twisted into this evil curse.

The end of the cord lies in shaking hands
That seem to have their own firm plans
Of when to tug and when to let be
Because this rope is not to kill me.

I wove this rope of silence and fear
Of the loss of all that I hold dear,
Despite insisting all of the while
That my thoughts and truths were not on trial.
Lies told by my insecurity
To preserve my sense of maturity.

This lesson I learned as I have grown:
My silence belongs to me alone.

Moments of Quiet

Chris 2 Comments

It is these moments of quiet,
As my brain creeps toward sleep,
That keep me up at night.

The time before is calm and soft:
Full of lingering traces of all
I have accomplished that day
And everything I desire to do
When I wake on a brand new day.

The time after is strange and quick:
Full of half dreams lost to me
As soon as their story has ended
And small movements that feel fast
As my body begins to slumber.

During, though, there is only silence.
I am left with the darkness of my room
Mirroring a darkness inside of me
I can only manage to drive away
With things that would keep me from sleeping.

During these moments of quiet,
I am the captive audience of my fears
And every single thing that went wrong
During any day I can remember
Plus a few more I had once forgotten.

It is no wonder I do not sleep well
When I cannot bypass these moments
Without crashing from awake to asleep.

Lost Connection

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Dancing dots spin and whirl
As I fret and watch the screen.
Seconds tick and minutes pass
As I mourn what might have been.
Passcodes take too long to type
As I start to make a scene.
Why’d my phone have to shut off
As you started to come clean?

I swear I want to hear you out
As I quickly make my case,
But anger soon fills up your voice
Knocking patience out of place.
My words become lost in yours
And then vanish without a trace
Because your pain and questioning
Have left my answers with no space.

I sit and listen for a while,
Until I can take it no more,
Then I gently set my phone down
And think back to moments before.
That sudden sound of silence
As my stomach dropped through the floor:
I felt relieved that I’d not need
To put up with you anymore.

Melancholy

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Rainy grey days and soft muted nights,
Fog in the trees obscuring the lights
Of passing cars and the lone street lamp
As the world revels in the wet and the damp.

The quick pit-patter of dripping rain
Against the roof and window pane,
The bend and sway of leaf and tree,
The storm-blown scratch of spring debris,
The susurrus of water on grass
As the clouds roil, break, and pass.

A hint of loam and earthy strength,
A touch of fresh that runs the length,
Something new to mark the year
As the scent rides wind far and near.

The cold pin-prick of rain on skin
To mark the storm will now begin,
The deep chill gust that cuts to bone
And leaves stout souls to walk alone,
All hint of warmth retreats from hearts
As the skies open and the rain starts.

Unlit grey rooms and seats to rest
By windows with forehead pressed,
A crack to pull in rain-soaked air
And a blanket warm waiting near,
Silence reigns loud to give the storm
Ample room to sooth and perform
For those who watch and wish to be
Nothing more than melancholy.

 

Words

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I still haven’t gotten my buffer built up. I’m spending the entire day traveling and helping my friend move into her new apartment, so I’m unable to do much writing today. I’ll hopefully get back to the regular schedule tomorrow, but we’ll see. It’s hard to predict what the holidays will bring. Since I want to give you all something, have another poem I wrote a while back

Words stuck behind a pane of glass
Rebound and pierce like tiny pins,
Given free reign to quickly pass
Through my soul like trivial sins.

Wrapped in Silence

Chris 1 Comment

As you sit in your bedroom, legs extended toward the foot of the bed and your back leaning against the wall, you can feel the heavy weight in your heart beat against your chest. It beats arrhythmically, out of tune with your heart and the pumping blood that courses through your body.

The weight is silence. The silence of the quiet thump of your heart and the rushing of blood in your ears. The silence of thousands of synapses firing as wild, uncontrolled thoughts tumble through your mind without leaving more than a faint trail that is wiped away by the same winds that give them agency. The silence of love unspoken and bitter last words that can never be reclaimed. A silence so complete that you can feel your voice, the voice with which you narrate your existence and that gives you a sense of self, fade and crumble in its face.

Outside, there is a similar weight pressing inward. It works its way through the blanket that wraps your legs and the sweatshirt you wear until it nestles against your skin like an itch you can never quite find, no matter how long you scratch.

This weight is also silence, but a separate silence. The silence of a fan blowing in the background, a constant whir that never ceases or varies in any perceptible way. The silence of an apartment full of people who are all busy with quiet things. The silence of a nearby highway humming with the steady stream of cars full of people who make their way from one place to another without ever conceiving of you as a being with your own hopes, dreams, and thoughts.

Some people, somewhere in your building, make a small noise that you know exists, but it is not strong enough to make its way through the walls and plaster that guard your apartment against their intrusion. The few people who, passing in their cars, look in your direction cannot see you for the brick and aluminum that guard the outside of your building against intrusion.

The two weights press against each other, pulled to each and yet repulsed by each other, constantly trying to escape from the other in one direction while being pulled toward it in the opposite direction. As the ebb and flow of their tugging begins to tear you apart, you quiet your mind and lay aside all of the rambling, rumbling thoughts that tumble through your mind.

This new silence, the silence of the mind after a long day; the silence of the mind when all thought has come to naught; the silence that reigns over the darkest moments of humanity; the silence that lifts up and glorifies the brightest moments of our lives and the lives of those we love; this silence settles into your mind.

As you sit and feel the power of this new, third silence, you let it flow out of you. It sweeps down to your heart and pulls the first silence with it. It glides outward then, capturing the second silence in its grasp and slowly wraps Silence around you, embracing you with a blanket devoid of warmth but resplendent with comfort. It pulls and tugs until not a scrap of you is left uncovered and slowly settles until you can feel it seep into your very bones. It takes such a hold of you that you are left wondering if there ever was something other than silence in your life; you wonder if have ever had a voice or heard a sound or if it was all a dream from which you have woken.

You feel the muscles in your chest expand and contract as you breath. You feel the muscles in your throat prepare the way for the word that will shatter the silence. You feel your tongue curl and move so that, as the vibrating air passes, it will make the correct sequence of sounds that will forever destroy this heavy, peaceful silence. As it builds, you can feel it coming, you can feel an end to everything you’ve ever know coming on the crest of this wave.

And then your muscles relax and the moment is passed. As your breath keeps its place in the first silence, your throat keeps its place in the second silence, and your tongue keeps its place in the third silence, you feel a fourth silence settle over them all. With this silence, the silence of the word unspoken, you feel the warmth that was lacking settle into you, the comfort is no longer cold and strange but familiar in a way that you cannot comprehend but wish to never be without again.

 

Song in the Silence: A Loud Endorsement

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“Song in the Silence” is the debut novel of Elizabeth Kerner, published in 1997, and the first novel in what eventually became a trilogy. There is a wonderful story captured in the pages, just waiting to be explored once you’ve managed to make your way past the stereotypically nineties cover art. I don’t know if I can say it was a unique story because my knowledge of female writers of fantasy from the nineties is sorely lacking (something I’m trying to change), but I can definitely say it had a much different tone from most other fantasy novels I’d read.

While the world doesn’t have the same kind of almost-human characterization some other fantasy novels go for, it still conveys a sense of breadth and depth to the readers. The bits of historical information Kerner provides to make the world feel real are worked into the flow of the story and they never feel like exposition or an information dump aside from one or two moments where a major historical event is shared with the protagonist so she understands the enormity of what’s going on. Even those moments feel a lot more natural than they otherwise might because they’re almost always delivered in the form of smaller stories told by one character to another. Though only a small portion of the world is shown through the course of the story, the introductory narration and the traveling the protagonist does firmly establishes a much larger world that you can feel hovering around the edges of the story as you read through it.

The mythology, which sets the stage for the main conflict of the novel and of the trilogy, is not entirely new though Kerner does a great job of breathing new life into it. The mythology plays into the trope of Dragons as beings of order and demons as beings of chaos, informing the ways the two groups interact with not only each other, but with the neutral humans who can, of course, pick either chaos or order. Which, in this story, means that humans can be good or evil, relying heavily on the cliché of order being good and chaos being evil. There is no way to avoid clichés entirely, nor is it necessary to do so, but this particular one has always felt like too much of an oversimplification to me. That being said,  I would call this particular cliche more of a pet-peeve than an actual issue in this case. Kerner’s story may lean heavily on the “human ability to be good or evil” idea, but the idea is used as less of a crutch and as more of a support beam. It is incorporated into the story as an important aspect of the story itself rather than used to prop up a weak philosophical concept a character is espousing. It turns from “chaos is evil and order is good” into “this person is evil and uses the power of chaos to act against order and good separately, in pursuit of their selfish goals.”

One of my favorite parts of the book is that every character in the novel could be you, your friends, or someone you’d meet at work. Unlike most fantasy characters, who I would not want to meet because they’d be insufferable, I would actually love to hang out with the people from this book. Maybe get a drink or a late brunch. They all have their flaws and they all tend to keep running into trouble as a result of them, but never in the same way. Some characters learn of others’ flaws and exploit them, young people are inexperienced and rather stupid, and the powerful are somewhat impulsive as a result of overconfidence. The protagonist, a young woman, falls into a few traps over the course of the novel because she is naive. She struggles with how to relate to some of the other characters because she learns of these huge gaps between her experience and theirs. The villain almost cackles over a steaming cauldron, but it is strongly implied that he’s gone insane at that point, as a result of all of the demon magic he uses. It feels a lot more natural because you can also imagine him cackling over a bowl of oatmeal or as he goes for a pleasant afternoon hike.

In direct opposition to the humanity of the characters (including the non-human ones), there was a rather heavy-handed romance subplot in this book. The protagonist and her love interest wind up in a relationship and loving each other not because they’ve gotten to know each other well and developed a relationship, but because they lay eyes on each other and begin to fall in love. There are prophecies mentioned here and there, as a part of the prophecies driving the major plot points of the trilogy, that make it seem like they were destined to love each other. After they’ve confessed their love for each other and had a soul-bonding moment, the relationship gets significantly more normal if you pretend they actually took their time getting to that point. I like the later depictions of the romance and their relationship better because it more closely matches the more human way most relationships in our world work.

I would recommend reading “Song in the Silence” if you want a book with interesting and real characters, a well-developed world that fits nicely into the “high fantasy” genre, an entire race of intelligent and rather “human” dragons, and don’t mind one of the major plot points being a Disney princess style romance that feels a bit shoehorned into the rest of the story. It is a rather quick read, though I recommend taking the time to pace yourself rather than attempting to devour it in one day. Though quick, it is still a bit too meaty for a single sitting.