#STFU

It's been six years and I still haven't managed to get round to it, even though it would literally cost me close to nothing and would just require me to isolate myself and shut my trap. I say ‘it would cost me nothing,’ though, thinking about it, I may be putting what little sanity I have left on the line by attempting said experiment.

Lots of people when they meet me, find me to be quite a cheerful character. I’m always smiling and laughing and trying to motivate people to be the best they can be (or so I hope), so it can be quite hard for them to imagine that I wrestle with any demons in the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory daydream that I live in. Like anyone else though (and very much like Willy Wonka), I have my demons too.

I am my own worst critic, and if you think I’m a BITCH in general, you should see how much of a BITCH I am and have been to myself over the years. I cannot express nor fully relay perhaps how often I have to still wrestle with notions of inadequacy and hopelessness. I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes just to pray myself through the toxic whispers that contaminate my mind…in the silence.

I spent years of insomnia during my late teens where I became almost delirious, just battling voices that would not go away. Voices that would tell me how much of a failure I was, how I would never amount to anything, how I was cursed by God, how I would spend my life in abject lonely misery, that I should just end it all…

And all of this went on (can you guess where?) in the silence…as I’m sure it does for many people, because I refuse to believe that I’m alone in this. In this age of distraction, people can literally run away from everything for the duration of their lifetimes! Some people live their lives without ever dealing with core issues like how they see themselves, whether or not they are happy, if they’re moving in the right direction. They just go mindlessly from one thing to the next, always moving and never thinking.

However, the day of reckoning will come and whether it’s after a lifetime or while there is still an opportunity to turn things around, there is no escaping it. The silence will catch up with us.

Dramatic? Perhaps.

But I can’t shake off the feeling that the answer to the problems that plague us is in us learning to make peace with the silence. We need to stop making noise in an attempt to distract or deny the presence of the little devils in our minds, because we often just end up disorienting ourselves. Our demons need to be confronted head-on without distraction and without fear, if we are to truly overcome them.  

As Chaim Potok, author of the Chosen once wrote, “I’ve begun to realise that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all of its own.”

I have a lot to learn (and a lot to confront it seems) in this respect.

Now, I’m not sure I’m ready for a whole day of silence just yet, but maybe I’ll try an hour.

And as Willy Wonka himself once said “Little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous!”