Tag: silence

Struggling with fluctuating hormones, Wendy Gan is inspired by the musician Mino to stop muting herself and return to writing.

Elissa Bassist breaks her silence about everything she’s not supposed to talk about and comes out alive.

Women who spoke too angrily or too publicly were punished in cruel and unusual ways.

Michele Filgate reflects on her teen years with an abusive stepfather and a mother whose silence protected him.

While teaching English to communist party officials in post-war Laos, Kathryn Kefauver Goldberg reflects on silence and the legacy of trauma.

The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she […]

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.” True hermits, according to […]