The Weight of Silence

Photo by Bui Hoang Lien on Unsplash

The sunlight was streaming through the chicken wire windows of the classroom, its warmth mocking a barren moonscape in my chest. The teacher’s voice droned on— pleasant enough, though a hum faded into the background like the static of a transistor radio as I stared down at the book in front of me. The words on the page might as well have been dancing ancient hieroglyphics.

At the blackboard, a boy scratched out rows of crater-like zeros with white chalk. I watched, transfixed, as he began to lose count, mumbling, his hand rising to his mouth, hesitating, then moving faster. It was like watching myself in slow motion —fumbling, overwhelmed, and unsure if I’d ever get it right.

That boy was in fact me, as if in a dream where my body was in two places at once. Ever have one of those?

As a young child, learning first felt like a world of endless possibilities. Letters, shapes, and sounds skipped across the page, inviting me to explore their mysteries. But soon, the lyrical ballet turned into a tangle of clumsy missteps. Words blurred into meaningless lines. Math problems pretzeled themselves into riddles I couldn’t solve. Handwriting felt like trying to climb a mountain without ropes—or even shoes.

Math became my worst subject. Reading and writing weren’t far behind.

One day, the entire school gathered in the gym for a special assembly. I could barely contain my excitement because I knew the speaker from my neighborhood. My enthusiasm spilled out in bursts—questions, excessive talking, laughter. It's what children do.

The teacher’s sharp voice cut through the air like an ice pick:

Sit down and be quiet.

The sting of her words hit harder than I expected. Almost as hard as my mother’s. Her impatient glance was like a verdict: I was too much, too loud, too disruptive. My classmates’ quiet groans sealed it as if I was holding back the progress of the entire school. A burden. I might as well have been stranded on a spacewalk, my tether to the mothership cut off.

That was the moment I stopped raising my hand. Why bother? Others were more important. What I needed didn’t matter, floating in zero gravity.

Asking for help felt too risky. I learned to blend in. I often nodded in agreement even when I didn’t understand, mimicking the movements of those around me. Daydreaming, looking out those institutional windows into a grassy hillside, became my escape—a sanctuary from the shame of not knowing, from the growing sense that what I felt didn’t matter. That I … didn’t matter.

The avoidance didn’t stop at academics. Even my basic needs were wrapped in shame, that dark star, eclipsed my spirit, sucking the warmth from my soul, leaving me adrift in the cold, empty expanse. I remember sitting at my desk, desperately needing to use the restroom but staying silent. The fear of drawing attention froze me. The inevitable accident only deepened the humiliation, feeding the cycle of shame.

The silence grew heavier, shaping my formless identity. I began to believe I wasn’t just struggling —I was broken, defective, that I didn’t belong on the planet. Better off on the dead surface of the Moon.

At home, I clung to small victories, secretly memorizing facts from our family encyclopedias from 1968. I hoped that knowledge might save me, might fill the widening gap between me and the world. But it never felt enough. By the time I was eight years old, I was convinced I must have brain damage. I would never be enough.

In truth, it wasn’t my brain that was broken—it was my spirit. An unthinkable weight settled on my chest, stealing my breath and filling my thoughts with doubt. I would never be able to lift the weight of their judgments.

So, in second grade, I found myself at that blackboard, holding a piece of white chalk. My tiny hand scratched out a row of zeros.

I was giving an oral report on NASA’s Apollo program, my voice trembling as I tried to explain the power needed to lift the Saturn V rocket into space and eventually to the moon. My heart raced as I added zero after zero, trying to express the enormity of that power.

The zeros seemed infinite, sprawling across the board —a testament to the vastness of what I didn’t know —and the gravity of carrying that silence.

It was a moment of unbearable dissonance and disconnection. I was standing there in front of the class, trying to sound confident while the gravity of my silence threatened to crush me. I couldn’t say the number.

I didn’t call it a voice then. I didn’t even know what I was missing — a sense of self as a unique personality. But as a young adult, with the support of a therapist, I began the slow, painful process of untangling the tight knots of shame and silence. The heavy lifting of therapy.

Therapy taught me what I never learned in a classroom: that it’s okay to have needs, and that asking for help is not a weakness. It is, in fact, an act of strength. Was I expecting too much from a teacher?

Each small step of self-advocacy became a brick in the foundation of self-acceptance, and a little more agency. A clearer sense of self and internal connection. Over time, I realized the roots of my struggles ran deeper than I’d imagined. It would take years before I understood that the weight I carried wasn’t just mine. My mother, and her mother too, had carried a lifetime of unmet needs, and those burdens had quietly shaped my world. I was, in part, carrying a weight that wasn’t mine to carry.

Today, my office is a sanctuary where I help others navigate their own struggles. As a psychotherapist, I understand the consistent heavy lifting it takes to confront the generational weight of silence and shame. Kindness is mandatory. We are all learning. None of us has all the answers.

If you’re wondering, those zeroes on the blackboard taught me something far more important than math. They taught me about possibility—the possibility of lifting off, and up, even when the weight feels unbearable.

And the Saturn V rocket? It required a staggering 7.5 million pounds of thrust to escape Earth’s gravity. For me, lifting off meant confronting many lifetimes of silence and shame. And while that weight wasn’t measured in numbers, the effort to rise was no less extraordinary.

Perhaps your zeros look different from mine—a career that feels out of reach, a relationship that feels too broken to fix, or a voice silenced for too long. But just like the Saturn V, the first step to lift off is to recognize the weight you’re carrying, and that it might not only be your own. And maybe, just maybe, recognizing the weight you’re carrying—and letting go of what isn’t yours—will feel like touching down into your own Sea of Tranquility.