THE INKWELL SOUL

Tag: #silence

  • The Weight of the Unspoken

    This feeling – that my history is a vast, dark forest where others might get lost or flee – is a heavy burden to carry. It makes me treat my voice like a secret weapon that I have dismantled for safety, worried that if I reassemble it, the sound would be too loud, too jagged, , or too “much” for the world to hold.

    The truth is, we often quiet our voices because, at some point, the world or the people in it taught us that our complexity was a “complication.”

    I have swallowed my history like stones, one for every year, one for every scar, until my throat is a dry well and I’ve forgotten where the bucket and the rope are. I ask: Where is my voice? And the silence answers back in my own tone – I have traded my speech for a fortress, thinking it better to be quiet that to be known and then rejected.

    There is a phantom fear that my past is a flood, a dark water of “too much” and “too long ago,” that if I opened the floodgates of who I am, the people I love would have nowhere to go but away. I worry my history is a map of dead ends, a collection of flaws too sharp to be touched, that if they see the wreckage behind the curtain, they would realize they didn’t love me that much.

    So I keep the volume at a whisper. I prune my edges to fit into their frames. I hide the chapters where the ink is smeared and the characters have no names. I have learned to be a “soft” version of myself, a ghost in the corner of my own life, terrified that the “real” me – the loud, the hurt, the raw – would be a fire that cuts like a knife.

    But how can I be loved if I am a shadow? How can I be held if I am made of mist? The flaws I fear will drive them away are the very things that prove I exist. Maybe the voice isn’t lost, just waiting for a silence that feels safe enough to break – for a heart that doesn’t see a “burden” but a soul with a story it’s finally ready to take.

  • The Glass Partition

    “The tension between needing solitude and wanting to be seen is like standing behind a one-way mirror: I feel protected because I can see out but no one can see in, yet I find myself pressing my palm against the glass, hoping someone notices the smudge I left behind.”

    It is the “Solitude Paradox” – the fear that being known will ruin your peace, combined with the fear that staying hidden will eventually erase you.

    I am the architect of my own island, I’ve dredged the sand and raised the cliffs until the horizon is nothing but my own reflection. There is a profound mercy in this distance; no one can misread my silence here, no one can clumsy-foot through the garden of my grief. Here, I am the Queen of a quiet country, uninterrupted, unburdened, and untouched.

    But the walls that keep the storm out also keep the warmth from coming in.

    I sit by the window of my own making, watching the world move in blurred streaks of color, and a treacherous thought begins to bloom: Does anyone see the light left on in this room? I want to be discovered, but I don’t want to be hunted. I want someone to find the secret door, but I’m terrified of what happens when the hinges creak open and the dust of my decades is exposed to the air.

    It is an exhausting dance – to pull the blanket of anonymity over my head while secretly praying someone notices the shape I make beneath the covers. I want to be “seen” without having to explain, to be understood without the autopsy of conversation. I am waiting for a ghost who speaks my language, someone who knows that when I say “I need to be alone,” what I am really saying is, “Please stay close enough to hear me if I change my mind.”

    Bravely, I am admitting I want to be “found” while I am actively hiding. It is not a contradiction; it’s a search for a very specific kind of safety – the safety of being truly known by someone who won’t try to “fix” the solitude out of me.