What Silence is Actually Trying to Tell You

We were taught that silence is uncomfortable.

Not explicitly. Nobody sat you down and said avoid quiet at all costs, but the message came through anyway. Fill the silence. Keep the conversation going. Turn something on. Stay busy. Stay connected. Stay stimulated. The moment a gap opens up, close it.

And so we did. We got very, very good at it.

There is always something playing. Always a scroll to return to, a podcast to queue, a conversation to extend past its natural end. We move through our days wrapped in a constant layer of noise and call it normal. Call it productivity. Call it staying informed, staying connected, staying sane.

But what we’re actually doing is running.

Because silence isn’t empty. That’s the thing nobody tells you. Silence is the most full thing there is. It’s where your own voice lives. The one that doesn’t belong to anyone else, the one that wasn’t handed to you, the one that has been trying to get a word in for years. It’s where God is. Where imagination opens up. Where intuition speaks. Where every answer you’ve been searching for in other people’s opinions, in the next book, in the next conversation, in the next anything. That’s where they actually live.

In the quiet.

And somewhere along the way, you were taught to treat that place like a problem.

Think about what happens in a room when conversation stops. The almost involuntary reach for a phone. The sudden need to say something, anything, to fill the gap. We’ve pathologized silence so thoroughly that sitting in it without immediately escaping feels strange. Feels wrong. Feels like something must be broken.

But nothing is broken. You’ve forgotten how to listen.

Your own knowing, steady and unhurried, offering you exactly what you needed before you went looking everywhere else. The imagination that doesn’t get to speak when the noise is running. The intuition that can’t compete with a room full of other people’s voices. You have been patiently waiting for yourself to stop long enough to remember.

That’s what you’ve been drowning out.

Not on purpose. You were trained this way. Silence got rebranded somewhere along the line as awkward, lonely, unproductive, something only strange or sad people sit in. And so you learned to fill it before it could ask anything of you.

Because silence does ask something of you. That’s the real reason it’s uncomfortable. It’s not that it’s empty. It’s that it’s honest. When the noise stops, what’s left is what’s true. And what’s true has a way of requiring something. A change. A recognition. An answer you’ve been avoiding.

So you keep the noise running. Not because you love it. Because you’re not ready for what the quiet might say.

But you are. You have been. The silence has never been the problem. It’s been the invitation.

And everything you’ve been looking for has been waiting there the whole time.