Your Silence Isn’t Consent

When people treat your calm as consent, they edit your story without permission. Naming your discomfort restores authorship. Your body holds the draft; your words bring it into the room.

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I learned calm
in a house that shook.

If I kept my voice low,
the cupboard doors stayed on their hinges.

If I moved slow,
the liquor didn’t grow teeth.

Later, you called me so grounded.
You liked how I listened
while you crossed lines like they were suggestions.

You read my silence
as a shrug.

You read my stillness
as agreement.

Inside, my jaw locked,
my chest lit up like sirens with nowhere to go.

I was calm on the outside
because I used to pay in bruises when I wasn’t.

You thought that meant you were safe.
It only meant I knew how to survive you.

My calm never signed your permission slip.

“Some people mistake your calm for permission.”

I grew up learning that any visible reaction could invite impact. The room was loud enough already. So my body adapted. I learned regulation as a shield. I learned how to flatten my voice, slow my breathing, and keep my eyes soft while my nervous system screamed behind them. Calm was a survival response that let me walk out of rooms in one piece, not a personality trait born from peace.

If you carry a background like that, your stillness comes with a history. Your calm is backed by hypervigilance, by years of scanning tone, footsteps, and micro-changes in a face. You know how to self-soothe in chaos, not because life felt safe, but because no one else was going to soothe you. People meet that version of you as an adult and call you “chill.” They enjoy the way you absorb tension. They lean into your regulation like a couch that never sags, and some of them decide your calm is an open door they can walk through however they want.

Here is the problem. A calm body looks the same from the outside whether it comes from nervous system regulation or dissociation. You can feel grounded, or you can feel gone, and from the outside it just looks quiet. You might sit there with your hands steady and your voice measured while something in you detaches a little to get through the moment. The other person sees the lack of visible anger and tells themselves “everything is fine.” They do not notice that your eyes went a little glassy. They do not notice that your chest pulled tight or your tongue went numb. Their story about you and your actual state drift apart.

Some cultures treat silence as respect. Some families train it as submission. Some of us grew up in homes where calm meant we survived the night, so we carry that same stillness into boardrooms, bedrooms, and group chats. People project onto it. They see their own needs reflected on your face. Your containment becomes their excuse. They forget that calm can coexist with hurt, that a regulated tone can still carry protest, that a soft response can still mean “no.”

If you want different outcomes, you do not have to abandon your calm. You just need to connect it to language and boundary instead of only to endurance. That might sound like: “I’m speaking quietly, but I am not comfortable with this.” Or, “I tend to go still when I feel disrespected, so I am naming this out loud.” When you say what your body is doing, you close the gap between their story and your reality. You stop letting other people treat your silence as a blank cheque. You give your nervous system a small act of repair: calm on the outside, clarity on the inside.

You are allowed to keep your steady voice and still refuse. You are allowed to value peace and still protect yourself. You are allowed to love your own quiet nature while also teaching people that your calm has limits. The ones who care about you will adjust. The ones who only liked you because you were easy to overstep will show themselves. That revelation hurts, but it gives you something clean to stand on. Your calm belongs to you. They do not get to use it as cover.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

When someone crosses a line and you stay quiet, what story do you tell yourself afterwards about why you didn’t speak?

If you’re peeling back wounds like this one,
the 365-Day Shadow Work Journals were made for moments like these.
They speak the same language you do. Truth before comfort.
Explore the journals →

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☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
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If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone. Healing Thoughts is where I say the quiet parts loudly. If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. It’s only getting rawer from here.

“An attack on our ability to tell stories is not just censorship; it is a form of psychic erasure.”
— Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” (1975)