When Silence Gets Loud

When Silence Gets Loud

By Hasnain Shah

Silence has a reputation for being peaceful. It is the thing we claim to crave after long days, after crowded subways, after conversations that drained more than they gave. We romanticize silence as rest, as stillness, as the calm surface of a lake reflecting a perfect moon.

But the silence I know is nothing like that.

The silence I know is the sound of thoughts multiplying in the dark, a swarm of gnats you can’t swat away. It is the ache that starts in the chest and spreads into the rib cage like a vine, squeezing tighter with each breath. It is the voice that begins softly—Did you forget something today?—and grows sharper, louder, until it drowns out everything else.

When silence gets loud, it does not arrive politely. It kicks the door open.

I remember one night in particular. The world outside my window was muted—no cars on the street, no neighbors clattering dishes, not even the hum of a distant plane. I should have been grateful. Instead, I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, trying to count the ridges in the plaster just to avoid the thoughts I knew were waiting for me.

The first thought was small: Did I answer that email correctly? Harmless enough, except silence has a way of turning questions into accusations. Soon it became You probably sounded incompetent. They’re going to notice. They’re going to regret trusting you.

The silence grew heavier.

Another thought followed: What if you’re not good enough for any of this? What if everyone else sees it already, and you’re the only one still pretending?

That’s when the ceiling ridges blurred, and the silence roared.

It’s strange to describe silence as noise, but anyone who has lived inside an anxious mind knows what I mean. The quiet outside only amplifies the storm inside. You start hearing your own pulse in your ears, the scrape of your teeth against your lip, the echo of every word you wish you hadn’t said that day, that week, that year.

In silence, time distorts. Five minutes can feel like fifty. One thought can feel like a thousand.

I tried to fight it. I told myself, Just breathe. I told myself, You’re overthinking again. But telling an anxious mind to calm down is like telling a fire not to burn. The silence was oxygen, and my thoughts were already blazing.

What makes it worse is that silence leaves no escape. In the presence of noise—music, chatter, even traffic—you can pretend your mind is part of something larger. But when it’s just you and the dark, there is nowhere to run. Every thought you avoided during the day sits down beside you, crossing its arms, demanding attention.

I remembered something a friend once said: “Silence is when the monsters come out.” She meant it as a joke, but that night, I understood it differently. The monsters don’t hide under the bed. They live inside you. And silence is the moment you finally hear their claws against the walls of your skull.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned after many nights like that one: silence is also a teacher. A cruel one, yes, but a teacher all the same. When silence gets loud, it forces you to listen—not to the monsters themselves, but to what they’re guarding. Beneath the noise of my self-doubt, I realized there was a truth I hadn’t wanted to face: I was exhausted. I was chasing approval like oxygen, terrified that if I stopped running, I would vanish.

The silence had only amplified what was already true.

That night, I sat up, turned on the light, and wrote everything down. Every fear, every ugly thought, every half-truth my mind had whispered in the dark. The page filled quickly, the silence spilling onto paper in jagged lines. And when I was done, I noticed something: the room was still quiet, but it no longer screamed at me.

I won’t pretend that writing fixed everything. Silence still grows loud for me, often louder than I’d like. But now I know what to do. Instead of drowning in the noise, I try to listen closely, to sift through the echoes until I find the small voice beneath them all—the one that says, You’re tired. You’re human. You’re still here.

And in those moments, the silence softens again.

Not the silence of a perfect lake, not a postcard peace. But a quieter silence, one that makes room to breathe.

Because sometimes, when silence gets loud, what it’s really asking is for us to finally hear ourselves.