On Silence

Forward 6/29/2021: Another relic from blogs past. Every few years, obsessed with my own significance, I would write a new “restart” post like this one, wherein I’d apologize (to whom is anyone’s guess) about not writing enough and committing to writing more before, inevitably, not writing again for a few more years and the next restart post. It was self-congratulatory bullshit and I wish I could say this is the last post of its kind to be written, but that would be a lie. If there is one thing I’m remarkably good it, its covering up low self-esteem with an overinflated sense of purpose. However, I do have a few good nuggets here about the purpose and power of self expression, so I figured a re-post was worth it.

I’ve been feeling pretty guilty lately.

One year ago, almost to the day, I wrote a piece about forgiveness — primarily of the self. What was I forgiving myself for? “Silence.” The piece concluded with an impassioned affirmation that I would forgo silence in favor of more proudly, and loudly, letting the world know where I stood on things. “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” and all that, as if my tiny little blog had some monumental potential that I was denying the world. It was not my best work, but it wasn’t my worst work either.

I subsequently went on to remain mostly silent for another year.

Now in this case, my use of the word silence is a little bit of a misnomer. I am, generally speaking, a verbose and fairly bombastic personality. Put simpler: in mixed company, it’s usually hard to shut me up. I’m also a teacher, and so a sizable portion of my job involves talking, which I do with joy and mirth more often than not. As the father of a toddler, I’m not even using real words when I speak roughly 64% of the time, but I am saying those non-words with power, conviction and volume so as to better normalize my child to human speech. Given all that, you’d be forgiven if you called bullshit on my “I was silent for a year” claim. And you wouldn’t be wrong as long as your singular definition of “silence” is “the absence of sound.”

However, I’m choosing to view silence a little differently. Sure, I talk a lot about a lot of things, but there is an ever-growing list of categories that I generally try to avoid in public discourse. These topics can largely be bucketed into the following chunks: the current state of the world, how I feel about it and what I think can be done about it. Or, as I somewhat depreciatingly think of it, “the things that matter.”

If you scroll down below this post, you’ll see that this is something I used to do fairly regularly. This was particularly true during and immediately after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, which coincidentally happened to be when I was in grad school and thus had a little more time for vapid oral gesticulation and self aggrandizement. However it would be a cop-out to blame my relative lack of output since then on my return to professional work life. And my while my entry into parenthood is certainly a more reasonable cause, if only for the dearth of time and energy (creative and otherwise) with which that venture leaves me on a regular basis, I’m not sure that is it either.

No, there is something deeper to my continued refusal to put myself and my opinions on “things that matter” out there in a public, or even semi-public way (a blog, after all, is only as public as the size of its readership). The longer I went without any meaningful written output to my name, the more guilt I built up for my perceived inaction. After all, I teach middle schoolers how to express their thoughts and feelings in writing and regularly hammer home the need for bravery in one’s work and reinforce the important catharsis that comes from getting one’s thoughts out of their head.

On the flip-side, I ALSO teach the virtue of active listening and the value of staying silent in order to allow others the chance to speak. One of my biggest pet peeves in the classroom is when students leave their hands up while another student is talking. I generally discourage this behavior as it signals a general lack of regard for other people. If you view the speaking time of another person as simply the time you need to wait until YOU are allowed to speak, then not only are you not listening, but you are tacitly admitting that what the person is saying has no value to you. (We live in a world with a lot of lofted hands right now.) Indeed, it is during periods of (personal) silence that learning becomes more possible. And to counter my feelings of guilt, I HAVE spent this time listening and engaging with voices and ideas I hadn’t heard before.

So, in reality, the guilt I’m feeling is not precisely related to my relative inability to write rambling, semi-researched and largely self-indulgent blog posts since I profess to value not talking and talking — and by association, writing — on equal footing. So what, then? Am I just feeling guilty because I’m naturally inclined to feel guilty? (Thanks Mom!) That’s part of it, sure, but not all of it.

I think the real answer here is fear.

I’m not writing because I’m scared to write.

(The overwhelming feeling of relief I immediately felt upon writing those words leads me to believe I might be on the right track.)

This conclusion makes a fair bit of sense. When I look back at the periods of time when I was able to do my most regular and sustained writing, I realized that they were all at immense points of transition in my life: right before I graduated college, the summer I started my second “Big Kid” job, right before I got married, the year I stopped working to go to Grad School and right after the birth of my first child. The one thing these times all have in common is that I was, briefly, more scared of other things than I was scared of the thing preventing me from writing.

But what am I so scared of?

At this point, a previous version of this piece saw me launch into a list of the things I thought I might be afraid of that might have been standing in the way of me writing more. It was an exercise in congratulatory self-coddling, since I followed each example with the reasons why I shouldn’t be afraid of said reason. But if I could process that I wasn’t afraid of those things, then they weren’t bloody well answering my initial question or helping me do anything other than provide a set of bandaids to feel better about myself. And on many different levels, this is not a post about feeling better fast. I’ve written countless feel good posts about why I can’t write and how I can start writing more (many of them on this very blog and the blogs that came before it). They have all been FULL of bandaids and vapid “YOU CAN DO IT” platitudes that I then completely ignored once I hit “publish.”

If I truly believed I could do it, I wouldn’t talk about doing it. I’d just do it.

Which leads me to the only entry on that list to which I did not have a response. The only one that really matters because it’s the one I’ve spent years trying to avoid or discredit instead of actually acknowledging it. What I’m actually afraid of; what keeps me up at night and, at least as far as the last few years are concerned, stops me cold every time I try to string more than five words together.

Silence.

I’m afraid of silence.

I’m afraid of pouring my heart out and being met with cold indifference.

I’m afraid to take time to research something I care about and have it be overshadowed by an unending wave of falsehoods.

I’m afraid of wasting what little time I’ve been given on this planet writing things that no one will read or, worse, read and immediately forgotten.

I’m ESPECIALLY afraid of saying the wrong thing and having someone I deeply value feel that they have nothing left to say to me.

I’m so afraid of silence in response to my work that I often can’t write anything at all.

I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades involved in some manner of performance, be it on stage or on the air or from behind the camera or keyboard. And for all that time I stupidly claimed that I was not performing for anyone else, that I did not care what my audience thought or if I even had an audience at all. All that mattered was myself; I was performing for me.

Which is bullshit. Complete and total.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t publish anything I wouldn’t want to read, but there is no such thing as a human being that does not need validation, and does not hurt when they don’t get it.

While it is immensely important to be able to validate oneself and find the positives in one’s work, no one is a magical emotion super hero that can continually validate themselves forever. (If anything, validation is my kryptonite.) At some point, we need other humans to say “hey, good job,” or “I don’t get it, but can see your passion,” or even “you’re totally wrong, fuck you.”

I’m not afraid of being disagreed with. I’m afraid of trying to matter and realizing I don’t.

Pop-Philosopher Mark Manson calls this “The Uncomfortable Truth” AKA the fact that no matter how hard we try, in the grand scheme of humanity’s time on this planet, we do not matter. And in universal terms, we are worth about as much as the individual atoms that make up our existence, if not less. So much of our psychological make-up are the protections we put in place to avoid this truth, which isn’t entirely unhealthy for us. Amongst the myriad of Theodore Roosevelt quotes from which I draw inspiration, one quote stands before all the rest: “black care rarely sits behind the rider whose pace is fast enough.” In other words, if you keep moving through life at breakneck speed, you never have time to be upset, listless or otherwise depressed. (No wonder this dude was so happy all the time. Bully indeed, Teddy. Bully indeed.) “Black care” and “the Uncomfortable Truth” are, in this case, one and the same.

But writing necessitates slowing down my pace long enough to put words on the page, which not only affords time for negative thoughts to creep in, but opens the door to a whole smorgasbord of negative thinking invariably leading back to silence. And so I keep moving; day to day, job to job, task to task. By not slowing down enough to write, I can sidestep The Uncomfortable Truth completely. You can’t be indifferent to something that doesn’t exist. You cannot ignore the words that are not written.

As I said above, this piece went through many permutations before I felt confident and/or foolhardy enough to publish the version you are reading. Most of them ended after the last sentence. This is not because I was trying to make an Elliot Smith-esque point, but because I had talked myself into a hole from which I could not dig myself out. It wasn’t until I happened to see the cover of a coworker’s notebook earlier today that things started to congeal a little bit more. On said cover was a simple quote, a variation of a popular adage that I’m frankly surprised I’d never seen before. If we’re being honest, it was the stuff of greeting cards, but sometimes it is the simplest message that can have the biggest impact.

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

Five words that quickly and succinctly tell you to get the hell over yourself. That you are neither as good nor as bad as you think. That things will be neither as good nor as bad as you anticipate. That if you think you shouldn’t try, you probably should, and if you think something is a bad idea, it might not be (and, absolutely, vice versa). That by avoiding discomfort, you also avoid authentic comfort. That being silent to avoid silence is completely ridiculous.

That maybe a little silence isn’t such a bad thing.

I’m going to take some time to let that one simmer. Then I’ll see what happens from there.

And if you keep checking back, so will you.

Originally published at http://iamprofoundlyodd.wordpress.com on September 19, 2019.