There is a kind of silence that isn’t quiet.
It follows you into the kitchen while you make coffee. It sits beside you on the sofa. It slips into the seconds between turning off the light and falling asleep.
Nothing is happening.
Somehow so much is happening.
I have been thinking lately about how strange silence can be when it comes from someone whose presence once occupied a space in your life. Not necessarily a big space. Sometimes that makes it even stranger. A voice you became used to hearing. A name appearing on your screen. A tiny rhythm that quietly worked its way into the architecture of your day.
Then… nothing.
No argument. No ending. No sentence you can hold in your hands and examine.
Just absence.
The rational mind should be perfectly capable of dealing with this. There is no information to process after all.
Except the mind hates a story.
So it starts writing.
Maybe I misunderstood.
Maybe I imagined things.
Maybe something happened.
Maybe I said much.
Maybe I should have said more.
Maybe they cared.
Maybe they never did.
Silence gives the imagination a blank page and an anxious mind can fill pages remarkably quickly.
What fascinates me is that after a while you are no longer responding to what happened. You are responding to all the meanings of what happened.
The silence itself becomes a kind of inkblot.
We stare at it. See abandonment. Rejection. Indifference. Fear. Confusion. Punishment. Sometimes even love.
Silence has said none of these things.
We have.
Perhaps this is why uncertainty can feel much more consuming than an answer we don’t want. An answer closes a door. Silence leaves us standing in the doorway looking into a room we cannot see.
The nervous system doesn’t particularly enjoy doorways.
It wants to know: Am I safe here? Am I wanted? Should I stay? Should I leave?
When no answer comes the body sometimes keeps waiting long after the mind has decided it shouldn’t.
I find that incredibly human.
We like to imagine ourselves as creatures who respond to reality. So much of our emotional world is built around meaning. We don’t only experience what people do. We experience what we believe their actions say about us.
That is where silence can become deafening. Because eventually it begins speaking in our voice.
You weren’t important enough.
You were foolish.
You should have known better.
You gave much.
Perhaps that is the moment when silence asks something much more interesting of us.
Why am I letting silence speak for me? Why is the mind writing the ending with the worst case scenario?
…
So when the mind starts writing explanations perhaps we can put the pen down.
We don’t need to know what the silence means. We need to accept that we don’t know. We need to come to terms, with uncertainty.
There is grief in that.
There is also freedom.
There is power.
Some questions will remain unanswered. Some conversations will never receive their sentence. Some people will leave us with a space where an explanation should have been.
Perhaps closure is not always something another person gives us.
Sometimes it is the moment we stop pressing our ear against the silence waiting for it to tell us who we are.
Sometimes it’s a blank canvas for you to draw whatever ending that brings you peace.
🤍
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