I used to hate silence. The silence of taxis, elevators and long lines unnerved and perplexed me. So did the eyes desperately darting downwards, plummeting into isolation as soon as someone stepped into an elevator. Short, cordial greetings met with even shorter goodbyes during taxi rides. A person standing a foot away from someone else in line for an hour without acknowledging they exist.
These moments held me captive to the overbearing silence that distinguished strangers from acquaintances. As someone who obsessively fills the space around me, I hated the separation that all these silences entailed. I never imagined the power they could harness.
In the fall of 2024, I began training to be a peer listener in A Place to Talk (APTT), an organization that offers peer listening services to students on the Homewood Campus. I was prepared to learn how to verbally support my fellow peers by providing comforting responses and empathetic questions.
I never expected my mentors to tell me I had to practice “silences,” an APTT term for shared moments of silence. How could I possibly comfort my fellow peers by leaving them to fend for themselves? I had thought silence meant uncertainty. Helplessness. A lack of direction. How could I ever surrender my peers to this overbearing solitude?
I will never forget the first time my training group practiced using silences. I was speaking to my friend. After professing my problems, I expected a validating “mhm,” or at least questions about how I planned to move forward.
Instead, I was just left with her unceasing eye contact, empathetic nods and silence. In this moment, neither of us rushed to fill the space between us. I began to reflect on what I had just said, letting it sit in the magnitude it deserved. Then, I continued to talk, diving deeper into my thoughts. I came to realizations too overbearing to be acknowledged in anything but silence.
In this moment, silence was not a surrender to helplessness, but a discovery of strength in vulnerability. My thoughts and feelings were no longer overshadowed by distractions. I could sense their meaning and magnitude fully. After this space was initiated by my friend’s empathy, it was powerful enough to stand on its own. It was in this that I found something more powerful than words, more provoking than questions and more defined than language: the sound of silence.
I started to embrace silence as an invitation for curiosity, vulnerability and appreciation. I realized that silence was never meant to show ignorance, but understanding. Every moment of silence I faced was actually an opportunity to listen. A moment to learn. To reflect. To delve deeper into the significance of the constant noise.
I began using silence as an opportunity to develop relationships. I became obsessed with diving deeper into the connections I made with people who I briefly crossed paths with. I invited my Uber driver to share his story with me, learning about how he has tried to start a better life in the U.S. and about his plans to unite with his eight siblings in Turkey. I learned how one of my favorite people who works at CharMar is a girl mom and how the security guard I walk past every day at Olin Hall is actually a man named Watson, one of the most compassionate and philosophic people I have ever met. I even discovered that the girl standing next to me in an elevator shared my favorite music artist.
I began to collect these pieces of people’s lives, and it wasn’t by being overwhelmingly extroverted or by talking about trivial things like how nice the weather is. It was from initiating connections with empathy and curiosity. It was from transcending silence into a space to appreciate and bear witness to others’ lives. Silence became a moment of unity, understanding and empathy as it evolved into a space for curiosity and connection.
I used to wring myself dry trying to fill the silences around me. But finally, silence transcended into stories as strangers became conduits for connection. I could hear it: the all-encompassing, deafening sound of silence.
Madelyn Dryier is a freshman from Frankfort, Ill. majoring in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
