Silence Use to Scare Me

City life makes you find comfort sound unlike anything else. It fills the silence with suspense, fills your head with images only city slickers or storytellers could conjure up so fast. We lose comfort in the nothing, forget that quiet is a state of being that is warm and welcome.

School got me accustomed to the stillness, but it took work.

It took walking inch by inch, fighting panic attacks rising my throat and blinking away tears that felt irrational. It’s the fear of the unknown, influenced by all the wack stuff you do know. In the city, you have to be careful, aware. You learn how to sense people around you, hear them over the rushing of crowds to move out of their way. The echoes of the woods are very different from the banging hum-drum of city streets. My lack of familiarity filled every crack and shifting leaf with images of attackers and assaulters because while the woods might be safe, in the city you know You Never Know what could be around. So, wherever you go you stay alert for the noises you don’t know, signals of danger easier to catch when they sound out of place than just thinking you see a spot in the corner of your eye. It was hard to articulate to many of my friends why I was afraid. Many of them find their greatest peace sitting in the trees, like I did before I moved back to the city. It was such a lonely fear.

I could not articulate the anxiety that swelled inside of me, how the silence sounded the loudest warning. Every time I closed my eyes and heard nothing, it felt like someone was behind me, waiting to strike. It felt like bullets were waiting around every corner. There’s something scary about empty city streets, no one around to hear you yell if you need to, and that protective fear follows you around. I didn’t realize how bad my anxiety was until I faced those deafeningly silent woods.

The woods and I are friends now, but I think it's because I'm starting to truly hear nature again. No longer is she a vast nothingness of threatening silence. Things once buried in my fear now sound distinct in a way that it hasn't since Florida. Before school ended(?), I would sit in the woods and close my eyes and see what I could hear. Rushing water, the trees groaning and creaking. I spent time with her, letting her sounds become a familiar home.





It reminded me of the book we read for class, Women, The Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, when it describes how different places value different levels of noise. I loved that part, where she discusses the idea of ramai because I understand being connected to and finding cultural comfort in noise. I grew up in the city and appreciate those noises, but even when I lived in Florida I was taken by its sounds, I was able to pay attention to the sounds of nature, they cooed and filled my ears with love, the buzzing of insects a whole orchestra to a 7 year old infatuated with the outdoors. When I wasn't listening to the secret shifting sounds in the trees, I was being noisy inside -- my house was always loud. Latin music made our small town shake and get swept up in waves of bachata. My mother’s booming laughter filled my ears and background noise became life’s little soundtrack. Before college, there was no time I didn’t have music blasting in my ears, and I was always singing. Coming here, however, surrounded by people who didn’t like noise, definitely didn’t like my music, and couldn’t understand why I liked it all so much, was so odd. I’m aware of it now, how much of my anxiety of the woods was just me battling my weird notions that I had with sound when I first came to school. It was so different, so scary, and it felt like I wasn’t supposed to find comfort in sound anymore since no one else did. I found myself slowly stopping my sound based coping mechanisms and being hyper-aware of my volume, even though it felt like lowering it was forgetting who I was and where I came from. Sometimes I think I lost parts of myself when I let myself abandon sound. If you were to ask anyone, I doubt they'd notice a difference. I'm still loud, still, make everyone listen to my music but, for a while, I didn't and people seemed happier that way. It came back only because I need it and began to reincorporate my headphones into my everyday life and ask my friends if they wanted to hear what I'd been jamming out to most recently, but it was hard to feel ok playing my music when every time I would sit there waiting for someone to tell me that they didn't like it or it was annoying, and it almost always happened. I had been bullied for years for my love of sound and singing and the comfort it brings me, but somehow the irritation it stirred in college friends was way worse than all that. Only recently have I found myself singing again.






I miss the woods, and I am grateful that I spent that time learning again to hear nature, to bask in the lovely silence, and eagerly hear her fun noises. Because of the time I spent warming up to her, now that I’m home I can hear the birds in the morning. I've lived in this house for 3 or 4 years now, and it feels like I have never heard a bird call from the confines of these walls. As we learned, there is always so much input happening to us endlessly, and our brains pick out what is and isn't essential. When I first entered the woods, my brain was on the hunt for threats, so it only heard things that could’ve been dangerous, and sent my anxiety soaring higher and higher. Sitting and just listening to the woods made those potentially dangerous noises recognizable, warm, and familiar; and I hear each noise as an individual tune, not ominous warning sounds. My brain has learned to recognize and value the bird calls. I never noticed that my fear kept me from hearing them, appreciating them, because I knew they weren’t a threat so I didn’t notice. Now, it's a sound I love, and my brain picks them out to brighten my day.





I woke up at 5 am and listened to them for a bit today. The sun had yet to fill my room, it shone like a small candle at the end of a long hallway; distant and dim but pure and lingering. It is in this darkness and the silence where the woodpeckers hammering sounds its loudest, a sweet reminder of the outside world I haven’t been able to experience in a while.


Now it is 10:40 am and my room is filled with the sounds of cars and trucks and it calms me in a new way. I am grateful to have them, good to know, for sure, that the neighborhood is still breathing. Each bump of a tire is a beat of a heart. Between the cars loudly passing, the birds chirp proudly. Their noises are welcome, sweet, fill my ears, and my heart with beauty.


If you can, take a moment, close your eyes, and just listen.





What do you hear?