On Silence

To speak, not to speak, or to watch RHOBH

Dear Kyle Richards,

I’ve recently become enamored with silence. Though I once wrote a poem called An Ode to Silence for someone else’s homework assignment in high school,¹ which I was compensated handsomely for,² it hasn’t been until very recently that I’ve contemplated its value. Even as a committed meditator, almost all of my day is filled with noise. I listen to eight hours of music a day on average and, on any given day, the other nine waking hours are filled with classes and homework. Though this is one type of noise which I similarly should examine my relationship with, I was interested in silence as an absence of word rather than as absence of sound.

My renewed interest in silence wasn’t for any other reason than the conscious realization that I already know what I think about everything, and I don’t know what everyone else thinks. Discovering what other people think about any given topic appears to have a greater capacity for change than what already lies inside of me. I don’t believe that this is a profound revelation by any means, rather, there was a value in having this understanding be brought before me in a way that allowed me to contemplate its consequences. One consequence, for better or for worse, is that I have less interest in talking in class than I have before. Whenever a professor used to ask a question, I would jump on answering it even if I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to say. Now, I care less to even if I do have something to say. If freshman year me knew this, she would be horrified. Honestly, I care less to profess anything at all under most circumstances. I’ve come to believe that being a conversationalist is less about having something interesting to say than it is about having something interesting to ask. I'm becoming more interested in questions than answers; particularly in questions that I’m not even sure have answers.

I’ve become interested in why I feel so disconnected with the people around me, even good people, people I care about, people I want to be more like, or people I want to be around; and it’s different than just having a rich inner world, though I admit that when it appears that someone else has an image of my world that is somewhat like mine, it is both paralyzing and intoxicating for its rarity and splendidness.

Most of my life has been led in a somewhat teleologically solipsistic manner; as has been the case for most of my life, I’ve felt consistently misunderstood. Even in college I’ve felt this way, and at a certain point, one has to realize that continuous feelings of misunderstanding must be at least in part attributed to one’s ability to communicate. Certainly, I do feel that there is a willfulness to this misunderstanding, and a lack of charitability that I find relatively unfair,³ as most people are on the defensive rather than the offensive. It is safer to assume that someone else has bad intentions rather than assume that they do not. We all have an understanding that everyone else is simply another person doing the best they can with the information and experiences that they have, though grace seldom ever follows. As such, most people are in near constant process of emotional damage control with themselves and other people, and you will, however (un)intentionally, be put in the crossfires on occasion. I find that I can chalk up most social dramatics to this crossfire; however, I have an interest in mitigating the circumstances under which I find myself utterly and totally misunderstood, to the point where I feel that my character in particular is being woefully misrepresented whether on a more public front or by an individual whom I care deeply for. It is, to me, a moral failure that anyone I should love be able to reasonably question my love for them, and one that I do not choose to take lightly.⁴

Sign hung by a church near my college

This winter, I started joking to myself that I am learning more about socializing from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills than I have from twenty one years of living and interacting with other people on earth; for one, this could be attributed to the fact that my inability to perceive indirect social signals is greatly aided by the dramatization of any and all circumstances by the Reality TV Overlords who spell out every disagreement for you rather clearly through greyed-out flashbacks and confessionals. Consequentially, it’s easy for me to understand where and why people draw certain conclusions from what may seem, to me, to be innocuous statements. Though my typical siding with the brunettes may appear a mere prejudice, I would like to believe that my generally Kyle-aligned stances are well justified.⁵

One of the most obvious conclusions I drew from seasons one and two of RHOBH was that people who talk more are more often misinterpreted. Again, fairly obvious given that misinterpretation is somewhat of a numbers game, and that the more things you say, the more opportunities you have to be misinterpreted. To a certain extent, it is easy to feel understood when there is nothing to understand. Silence requires no explanation. Silence is silence, and yet, silence finds a way to speak. We read into silences, find messages within them. A pause in a sheet of music can mean as much as a note. Silences act as a mirror, reflecting our own thoughts back at us, which is really what is so scary about a silence that seems to say that we are neither wanted nor loved.

On the other hand, silence can be deeply selfish. For the reason that we may fear misinterpretation, we may deny others what we owe them. We might owe them apology or explanation. By hiding behind our silence, we keep ourselves safe and we hurt others without ever saying a word. When I think about the times I’ve been most hurt by someone else, it has almost never been in what they said, but in what they failed to say.

One of the traits that I’m most proud of in myself is that if I use the word “promise,” then it means that. I never make a promise that I cannot keep. Instead, I will use a different word if there is a reasonable possibility that I will fail at what I promise. Why should the rest of my words not reflect such a commitment? I’m starting to sour on my own sarcasm and irony, however lighthearted. I don’t ever wish to be in a position where someone cannot tell whether I am joking and I don’t want to want to be funny anymore. I don’t want to want to post on Twitter. I don’t want to want to speak. I don’t want to want to be heard. It’s exhausting to feel like I have something to express all of the time. Moreover, it’s exhausting to feel as if you have to give into expression; to feel as if something about yourself relies on this ‘expression,’ and if you were to abstain, then that something may be lost. It’s exhausting being misinterpreted. Sometimes, I hate that the world really is built on interpretation.

I believe that one of the greatest lessons of my philosophical education is that total understanding is an impossibility. Our language is simply insufficient to express the totalities of what we could possibly desire to convey to one another. Our language is impoverished for the fact that it cannot translate everything that lies inside of us. We are lost within our language. Language is the cave we must seek somehow to escape; and yet words have always been my fondest friend, my most valued asset, and the mode by which I have chosen to make my way in the world. I feel devoted to an impossible project, trying to reach precision that I am unsure can ever come to be. Philosophy’s concern with language is both nauseating and enthralling; like a car wreck, I cannot help but watch as it burns in front of me and I attempt to save whatever is left.

A friend once said to me that it seems that my problem in relationships seems to be that I over-communicate. I’m troubled by the idea that I can say too much when words are all that we have, and the only way we can hope to be understood. I have yet to find out whether they’re right, and I hope that they’re not. The possibility of misinterpretation is the price we pay for connection. What we owe to one another is not total understanding, because that is not possible; what we do owe to one another is to be benevolent listeners, and to seek to understand, even though we will have to fall short. Something my dad always said was to “go by what I mean and not by what I say.” I never knew what he was asking, and now I do because I find myself having to ask that of others.

Language is a form of self-indulgence. Writing this is indulgent. Frequently I find that people don’t posit opinions because they have an interest in learning what the other person has to think about them: they wish for their opinion to be known, but that doesn’t have to be the case. I want to know how language has failed and betrayed others as it has betrayed me. More than that, I want to be wrong. I want to find the ways in which language feels like it encompasses what I feel inside of me. Until it does, I want to take time to be quiet. When I say something, I want it to improve the silence.⁶ I don’t know when I’ll have something worth saying, but when I do, you’ll be the first to know.

Sincerely,
PSM

1. Statute of limitations.

2. A crisp tenner and a cookie.

3. Re: a coke?-fueled speech by multiple peers (including one who formerly professed to a strong personal dislike of me, which I discovered via some rather loud statements made from the other side of the newspaper office walls) on Halloween night, 2025.

4. Reasonably because, as we know, Bitches Be Tripping™

5. Sorry, Camille. See footnote 4.

6. “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” — Borges