When Silence Becomes Your Identity

Many people who encountered and got to experience me on a personal level growing up would most likely have classified me as a shy, reserved and quiet person.

While friends who got to know me on a deeper level, would have termed me as somewhat talkative and humorous. These two camps of people would have been correct in their own way, because for the most part I consciously chose to show up differently depending on the situation. Self-preservation was the main reason I adopted a posture of silence in many situations; whether that was the best decision is highly debatable. And of course, having been brought up in a society where silence and invisibility is deeply tied to respect, traditional hierarchy, and the preservation of political structures, had its own role. I will not be touching on that in this post, as I want to speak more to the notion of self-preservation: how it served and protected me for a time yet eventually became a cage for my voice and self-expression.

One thing you can never take away from children is their remarkable ability to observe their surroundings and quiet adapt without anyone noticing. In the same manner, I was also quite an observant child. I knew what statements and actions would earn me a beating or a scolding from my parents, and so I learned to avoid those. I knew which personality traits were met with disapproval, so I reshaped my own to fit into the more approved category.

| Eventually, I learnt that silence, conformity and assimilation could go a long way with shielding me from societal and parental disapproval, and so I fully took these on as my identity, reserving the more animated parts of my personality for a small subset of people.

his seemed to be working well until somewhere in the middle of my adolescent years, where I realized that I had a paralyzing fear of speaking up in public. I would have these amazing ideas in my mind, but when it came to speaking them out loud, I would be suddenly overwhelmed by fear and anxiety. My heart would start to race, my palms and armpits would start to sweat, and a tight lump would form in my throat as I fought back tears. What was a well-formed, and amazing idea in my mind would come out as slightly inaudible and shaky fragments. It didn’t help that I was also dealing with many of the insecurities that plague most adolescents.

| In the process of protecting me from societal disapproval as a child, silence had caged my voice and had become my identity.

I did not realize it then, and so I avoided anything to do with public speaking during high school, convincing myself that I was simply not made for it. I somehow managed to get through the required class presentations and held onto the belief that academic intelligence was all that would eventually matter in building a successful life. After all, I could choose a non-client-facing career and continue living my reserved life. Oh, how wrong I was! These past couple of years have been a journey of unlearning and learning the power of being able to own and speak to the work you do, as well as the power of being able to tell your own story in a way that effectively communicates who you are, whose you are (come on Jesus girlies and bros), where you come from and what value you carry.

I now understand the difference between being an introvert and being afraid of speaking; these two are, in fact, distinct. As an introvert, I prefer and enjoy meaningful conversations more than frequent social interaction, as constant social stimulation drains me. However, I know that the fear of speaking in public and lack of confidence in that regard has nothing to do with introvertedness, but points to an underlying identity issue. I wish I could tell you that I have fully overcome the fear of public speaking, but that is still in the works. What I can tell you, however, is that silence is no longer my identity. I love speaking and witnessing the formation of my ideas into coherent and comprehensible sentences both at work and in my personal life. In closing, I would like to leave you with one of my favorite verses: Psalms 16: 6 “the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.”

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Intentional and Wise