Silence Is a Weapon and Almost Nobody Is Trained in It

I want to describe something you may have felt and not had words for. A room that is arguing, and one person who has not spoken, and the moment when the room begins to organise itself around that silence rather than around the loudest voice in it.

That is not passivity. Passivity has no weight and changes nothing. This has weight. People feel it and adjust to it.

Where I work, among the deaf and among people the world has stopped counting, I have watched a held silence do what a raised voice could not do in twenty years. Because a raised voice tells a person what to think, and a held silence tells them they are safe enough to say what they actually think, and only the second one ever changed anybody.

A weapon is not defined by noise. It is defined by what it can move.

The drum I carry is not loud either, most days. A drum is a heartbeat before it is an instrument, and a heartbeat is the quietest sound a body makes and the only one that cannot stop.

If you are the quiet one in the formation, you have almost certainly been told to speak up more. I would ask you to consider that you have been holding a specific weapon badly, by apologising for it, rather than holding the wrong weapon.

Your quiet is not the absence of a stance. It may be your stance, and you may have spent years being coached out of the exact thing you were issued.