When you go quiet, and what it might be telling you

Many of us know the feeling. Something is happening, at home or at work or inside, and instead of saying it we go quiet. We tell people we are fine. We get on with things. The words do not come, or they come and we swallow them.

Quiet can be easy to read as weakness or avoidance. Sometimes it is something else entirely. People go quiet for all sorts of ordinary reasons. Perhaps they have not worked out what they feel yet. Perhaps they are tired of explaining. Perhaps they are protecting someone from something they think would upset them, or learned somewhere along the way that speaking up led to a conversation they could not control.

The instinct can be to push through it, to force a conclusion or a plan. That does not always help. A kinder question than what is wrong with me might be: what is this quiet holding? You do not need the answer straight away. Noticing the question can be enough to begin.

Small, honest sentences can help more than big ones. I am more tired than I have been letting on. Something about this week has unsettled me. I do not know what I need. None of these needs fixing. Each one is simply true, and saying something true, even only to yourself, can sometimes loosen what is held.

If the words come more easily on paper than out loud, that is not a lesser way of saying something. Writing lets a feeling take shape at its own pace.