May 2nd, 2024: Silence

I left Atlanta at 3:30PM on Tuesday, flew overnight to Amsterdam, caught the short flight to Glasgow that arrived about 8:30AM local time, took a bus to Queen Street station, hopped on a train that trundled across Scotland to Montrose, switched trains at Montrose, exited soon after at Stonehaven station. The taxi dropped me off at the manse of the church in Stonehaven. The church is just outside of town a short ways, up a hill and next to a nature preserve. I walked in, put my bags down, unpacked all of my clothes into the dresser, fed the resident cat, and sat down. It was 1:30PM local time. I have absolutely no idea internally what time it is, nor how long I was in motion.

When I finally stopped moving and sat still, the silence here fully enveloped me.

A huge silence. A scary silence. The silence is big in this house, in this place.

I'm used to noise. There is baseline noise around me all the time as the parent of 3 children. But even when I'm alone, I choose (consciously or not) to fill the silence. I used to turn on the TV or the radio when I was in my 20s and living alone to keep me company. As portable devices became ubiquitous in the 2000s, I would often find myself, when alone, with headphones on, listening to music, or lately, a podcast. Keeping the silence away.

Rarely do I dwell in silence. Why? I suspect that I keep noise around because I don't want to be alone with only my thoughts. My internal world is more chaotic than I would like to admit. Worrying about my family. Anxiety about my own life. The inner world for all of us is a confusing, confounding one. In the silence, those inner voices have room to speak. What they say can be felt as un-settling. I often keep them at bay with noise.

The experience of silence has changed for in another way me since I contracted COVID in 2021. Sometime afterward, when I was alone in bed one morning, I heard a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I tried to ignore it, but it didn't go away for several days. I schedule an appointment with an audiologist, who confirmed that I was suffering from tinnitus--ringing in the ears. More concerning, the tinnitus is a symptom of permanent moderate hearing loss. The audiologist said there's not enough information to confirm a correlation between COVID and COVID vaccines and hearing loss, but that it seems to be one of the many odd side effects of the virus.

Now, when things around me get really quiet, the ringing gets really loud. 

It's not painful. It's just... mildly abrasive. Annoying. Grating. Sometimes, scary. Tinnitus isn't really a "noise." It's the brain creating noise to fill the void caused by the loss of your hearing. Many people experience tinnitus as suffering. Nothing cures it. The only thing that sometimes helps is... noise... white noise, therapeutic noise, something to distract the brain so it doesn't feel compelled to create the high-pitched "filler."

I'm going to be alone a lot over the next few weeks. I wanted this silence. I wanted space to welcome the voices inside me to speak loudly. But as is often true, silence will not be easy to keep. Not only will the dis-comforting voices come out, but my own body and brain will resist the silence--in my case, trying to fill up the silence with a high-pitched sound that only I can hear. 

Rather than receive silence as a threat to be overcome, I will try to befriend it. To welcome it as part of my world. It is so human to try and avoid what is painful for confusing. It is also human to compensate for a weakness by over-performing in some other part of life; my ears do it, too. 

Welcome, silence.