I have already written about silencing others and their emotions. Today I want to address the other side of the coin of silence.
There’s a silence that lurks between words, a silence that swallows lives whole. It’s the silence of not being heard—not because there’s no voice, but because no one cares to listen. This silence, this unhearing, wraps itself around the body and constricts like a tightening noose. You might call it a kind of violence, as silent as it is brutal. And we tolerate it. We even normalize it.
To feel unheard is not merely a private pain. It is systemic; it has structure, scaffolding, roots that go far into our culture’s darkest soil. What we’re talking about here is a culture of erasure—a world where voices are dismissed, perspectives discarded, experiences swept under the rug of “irrelevant.” We’re suffocating beneath the weight of this silence, while still pretending to talk.
This isn’t just about not being listened to. It’s about what happens to a soul that has been silenced so long that it begins to doubt itself. Do I even exist if no one hears me? Am I real if my words are swallowed by a void that spits nothing back?
The experience of being unheard hollows a person from the inside out. It carves out the core of self-worth, and we’re left wondering why people are so lost, so anxious, so detached.
In a workplace, it looks like this: innovation dies. How many ideas are lying in unmarked graves because no one listened? How many minds shut down, how many possibilities left unexplored because a hierarchy or a protocol deemed some voices insignificant? In families, it’s even more ruthless. Children grow up in homes where their questions, their wonder, are waved off as noise. Partners retreat into isolation when the echo of their needs is met with silence.
And yet, we have systems—industrial, educational, political—that only amplify this silence. Voices that defy the norm, that deviate from the well-worn track, are not merely ignored but actively suppressed. The echo chamber grows, and we build walls around ourselves, perpetuating the myth that some voices are “more important” than others.
But here’s the truth no one wants to say aloud: a society that does not listen to its people, to all of its people, is like a house built on rot. It looks stable until the ground begins to give way, and by then, it’s too late. When voices go unheard, it’s not just individuals who are at stake. It’s the collective, the community, the potential to evolve and create something whole and resilient.
We live in a time when the illusion of communication is at an all-time high. Social media, sound bites, endless opinions—all speak, but few truly listen. In a world desperate to be heard, who will be the one to listen?
The antidote to this sickness of silence is not more noise. It is presence. It is attentiveness. It is cultivating a fierce humility, a willingness to be moved and changed by what we hear. Listening is not a passive act; it is a radical one. To listen is to take responsibility. To listen is to allow yourself to be impacted, to admit that another’s voice might change you.
When we begin to hear each other—really hear each other—then we’re talking about a revolution. The kind that dismantles systems of exclusion, the kind that values people for the irreplaceable contributions they bring. This is how we rebuild. Because listening, as quiet as it seems, is louder than any silence we’ve known.
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