Silence is My Enemy

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, I am going to share a bit of my personal journey with depression and anxiety.

Let me start with, “I am in a good place right now!” The blog posts this month will come from my writings through therapy. In this first one of three, I was asked to write, “What am I when I remove all of my masks?”

To some, silence is a gift. It is serenity, a centering of being.

I do not have this relationship with silence, we do not play well together, we are not friends.

To me, silence is the enemy, the one who picks and scratches at old wounds so that they fester, never allowing them the time they need to heal.

The one who knows me like no other, the one who curls up in my insecurity as if in a warm blanket on an icy winter’s night.

The one who remembers

Remembers my every mistake, every misstep, every misdeed

I am more at ease, being engulfed in violence,

Than I ever had been, even touched by silence.

Silence is not calm, silence is chaos

Silence is pain, and not one that I wish to endure

Silence is deafening, it bellows in rage!

Silence despises me, and I, it!

It mocks me, it questions my integrity, my intelligence, my resolve.

It screams, “You’re not good enough!”

It shrieks, “She’s better off without you!”

Silence threatens to expose me for the fraud that I am

Silence is trying to rip, tear, and claw its way out from the very essence of my being

Silence is disgusting, grotesque to behold, horrific,

Silence is a shaking, seizing, convulsing atrocity, without redemption

Silence is anguish,

Silence is despair,

Silence is loneliness,

The silence is broken…

The Silence is, me.