You’re Not Talking. You’re Not Listening.

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

on rage, recognition, and the pain of uninhabited silence

There’s a kind of silence that doesn’t soothe.
A silence that doesn’t hold, doesn’t recognize, doesn’t respond.
And when met with that kind of silence —
while speaking from a place of truth —
some people don’t fall quiet.
They burn.

This isn’t about impatience.
It’s not about needing validation.
It’s about being left alone inside your own presence —
while the other remains physically there,
but absent in consciousness.

Most people associate silence with calm.
But in reality, not all silence is inhabited.
Some silence is just absence.
Some silence is avoidance.
And some silence is a passive way to escape the intensity of the other’s aliveness.

When someone speaks from within —
when they expose something felt, real, alive —
and the person in front of them says nothing, does nothing, holds nothing,
that silence becomes violence.

There is a particular rage that comes from this.
Not because you need to be constantly acknowledged —
but because your presence has just been ignored in the most subtle way possible.

It’s not that you need words.
You need resonance.
A nod. A breath. A shared rhythm.
Something that says:
“I am here with you. I hear you even in your silence.”

When that doesn’t happen,
the body reacts.
The fire rises.
You don’t feel met —
you feel left.

This is not the same as the reaction of someone who cannot stand silence.
This is not about fear of space.
This is about being the only one holding the connection
while the other drifts away under the pretense of “peace.”

True silence, as we’ve said before, is dense.
It vibrates. It listens.
It wraps around the other like a steady breath.

But this other silence —
the empty one, the unheld one —
is what causes the heartbreak we never name.

You don’t want noise.
You want response.
You want shared interiority.

So when you burn in the face of that quiet,
know that your rage is not irrational.
It is the voice of your body saying:
“I was here. And you weren’t.”