🇬🇧 It Wasn’t a Scream, But Neither Was It a Whisper

I can’t say when it began -

but I remember exactly when I noticed I could no longer speak out loud.

Not literally.

I have a voice.

I can articulate anything I need to:

a name, a number, a request.

But somewhere along the way, I learned that volume equals danger.

That shouting is violence.

That emotions voiced aloud become weapons -

not only for those who hear them,

but for those who release them.

So I began to speak more softly.

Until silence became my new language.

There are voices that make no sound.

There are screams without volume.

They live inside us -

in clenched jaws, stiffened necks,

the breathless pause between question and answer.

I don’t scream.

But my body resounds.

Sometimes like the echo of someone else’s sentence I couldn’t interrupt.

Sometimes like a chord left unresolved -

a dissonance between what I wanted to say and what I was allowed.

Sometimes like silence so thick it hurts the ears.

I remember one afternoon.

I must have been nine.

Someone was yelling — not at me, not about me,

but the walls weren’t thick enough to keep it out.

I sat down in the corner and covered my ears,

not because I feared the shouting -

but because I was afraid my own voice might join in.

That I’d be forced to speak.

To explain.

To justify.

But I had no words.

Only a body.

Frozen — as if it had switched to emergency mode.

As if the only way to survive was to eliminate sound.

Now I understand:

that’s when I began training myself to whisper.

Not the kind that carries intimacy,

but the kind that signals surrender.

A whisper that doesn’t want to be heard,

because being heard means exposure.

A whisper that hovers between speech and silence -

balancing on the edge of presence and absence.

Because that’s exactly how I’ve felt since then:

as if every emotion spoken aloud could trigger another storm.

As if my words could act as detonators — and I don’t want to hurt anyone.

Even if I was the one who got hurt.

But whispers don’t always protect.

Sometimes they just create distance.

From people.

From relationships.

From yourself.

2.

Some emotions come in colours.

Others — in sound.

And then there are those that come as echo.

An echo with no origin.

Or perhaps — the source vanished before I had the chance to locate it.

All that remained was a wave bouncing off the walls of my ribcage,

resonating now in the gut,

now in the neck,

now in a throat grown tight.

Sometimes people say to me:

“You’re not that boy anymore.”

And they’re not wrong.

I have more years behind me now,

more words,

more distance.

But then I hear something -

the shuffle of footsteps in the corridor,

a door slamming,

breath drawn too fast.

And suddenly, everything inside me folds in on itself, like a shutter.

I don’t have to remember.

Because my body remembers for me.

My body hears what’s no longer there.

And in that moment I know -

the scream no one heard

never really disappeared.

It simply relocated.

I don’t trust people who speak of emotions as if they were linear.

As if anger followed sorrow,

and sorrow followed trauma.

As if forgiveness were the end of the story.

My emotions don’t arrive in sequence.

They bleed into one another like sounds in an uninsulated room.

Nothing fades.

Nothing quiets.

Everything overlaps,

without warning,

without structure.

Sometimes it feels like I have a band inside me playing without a conductor.

Each instrument sounds off in its own rhythm -

off-key,

too loud,

achingly beautiful.

But more often: unexpected.

There are days when silence rings louder than a scream.

Nights when I can’t sleep — not because something happened,

but because something was left unsaid.

Silence, at times, causes auditory hallucinations in my mind.

I recall things no one ever said.

I hear words that were never spoken,

but could have been.

Or should have been.

And so I build myself a private archive of conversations that never took place.

Replies that never came.

Words I carry inside me like stones -

heavy,

mute,

but with shape.

It wasn’t a scream.

But it wasn’t a whisper either.

It was something in between:

a sound held in the lungs,

an emotion suppressed by a glance,

a feeling that, instead of being expressed,

settled in my chest -

and made itself a room.

Permanently.

3.

There is a moment -

when you’re talking to someone who looks at you with tenderness,

and you find yourself unable to receive that gaze.

Not because it hurts.

Not because you don’t believe it.

But because your body still remembers a time

when every gentle look

was a prelude to something that would soon be taken from you.

And you can no longer be just here and now.

You are also back there,

then,

yesterday -

a version of yourself that hadn’t yet known touch without violence,

that couldn’t tell care apart from control,

closeness from the need to possess.

You become like a broken VHS tape,

one that holds two different films

and plays them simultaneously.

And you don’t know which one to watch -

because one is the past,

and the other — a possibility.

Sometimes I disappear in the middle of a conversation.

My body remains,

my eyes,

my smiling mouth -

but I’m no longer in that room.

Not even in this country.

I’m back in a room with walls too thin,

and silences too thick.

Sometimes it takes just a gesture -

too quick, too familiar, too… similar.

Sometimes a scent.

Sometimes a shift in the tone of someone’s voice.

And I’m right back where I learned to freeze.

For the longest time I didn’t know

that what I called “introversion”

was just a survival strategy.

I couldn’t stay with people for too long,

because every closeness reopened folders

that should have long been archived.

But they weren’t.

Because no one ever taught me how to archive the past

so that it wouldn’t sound like a scream.

And wouldn’t have to become a whisper.

As an adult, I try to find language for all of this.

Not to tear anything open.

Not to invite pity.

But simply to finally hear something.

Because now I know that silence has volume.

That it can resonate longer than any “I’m sorry”

and speak more clearly than “I love you”

said too late.

And if I’ve never managed to scream,

perhaps it’s because inside me

there was still a concert of silence

playing to an audience I never invited -

but had to perform for anyway.

4.

Sometimes I feel like I’m made of endless omissions.

Of feelings that never made it through my throat,

of sentences that broke off just before the end,

of stories too painful to tell

and too important to forget.

My body speaks a language I was never taught.

The language of tensed muscles, of quickened breath,

of furrowed brows, of flinching

when someone reaches out their hand.

It’s the language of caution.

The language of survival.

I don’t know how to speak of my boundaries in any other way than through my body.

When I tense up.

When I freeze.

When I vanish.

The body always speaks first -

sometimes even before I realise that something’s wrong.

And I know it’s not the same as a scream.

But I also know it’s not silence.

It’s something in between -

an attempt to be understood without having to explain.

Only this language rarely finds a listener.

People prefer clarity.

“Say what you feel.”

“Put it into words.”

“I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”

But what if everything I have to say

happens beneath the surface of my skin?

What if the greatest story

is the one unfolding between my breaths?

Sometimes I wish I were the kind of person who could scream.

Who could howl with grief,

pound a fist against the wall,

declare their existence at full volume.

But I’ve always been the one who kept quiet.

Not because I had nothing to say.

But because once, long ago,

I learned that silence was safer.

Silence doesn’t provoke.

Silence doesn’t betray.

Silence leaves no trace.

Silence needs no explanation.

And now, when I try to speak,

it doesn’t come from the throat — it comes from the core.

It’s not a word, but a tremor.

Not a sentence, but a presence.

It wasn’t a scream. But it wasn’t a whisper either.

It was me -

whole, indistinct, cracked -

trying to say:

I’m here.

5.

Some sounds stay with you forever.

They don’t have to be loud.

Sometimes the ones that cut deepest are the quietest -

a muffled grunt,

a door slamming,

the scrape of a key in the lock,

a long sigh from someone who no longer wanted to see you.

Sounds that were nothing more than fragments of the everyday -

but your body archived them as emergency signals.

I don’t know how many of those sounds I carry.

But I do know that all it takes is one -

completely random -

to make me feel once more like a child who’s forgotten how to breathe.

People sometimes ask:

“Why do you react like that?”

“But nothing happened.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“You’re too sensitive.”

But it’s not me who chooses what echoes inside me.

It’s the echo.

An echo that doesn’t listen to reason,

doesn’t understand chronology,

doesn’t obey logic.

It only bounces back

whatever once felt too intense to simply fade.

I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to open up.

Not because I don’t want to -

but because I never know when something inside me might switch back on.

Like a random noise that suddenly reminds you of something

you no longer want to remember,

but that still lives in your spine,

in your shoulders,

in your jaw.

So sometimes I choose silence.

Sometimes I walk away from a conversation.

Sometimes I don’t reply to a message.

Not because I’m ignoring you -

but because I’m trying to stay inside myself,

instead of going back to where everything turned to ice.

My scream isn’t a voice.

My scream is the tremble in my eyelids when I can’t sleep.

It’s my bitten lips.

It’s fingernails digging into the palm of my hand.

It’s excessive politeness in an uncomfortable situation.

It’s apologising too much.

It’s a smile that hurts.

My scream doesn’t shatter the air.

It only shatters me from within.

But I’m learning.

I’m learning that sometimes I am allowed to speak.

That my “I don’t know” is enough.

That my “not now” holds value.

That my “I’m scared” doesn’t have to be loud

for it to be heard by those who truly want to listen.

Because the silence I once learned

doesn’t have to be a shield anymore.

It can be a form of presence.

Silence that doesn’t run away.

Silence that stays.

Silence that speaks more than words.