When I was younger, I learned to appreciate silence.
Not because I was particularly wise or introspective. I learned to appreciate it because other people’s energy—the noise, the movement, the constant pull for attention—could sometimes feel overwhelming.
My family was loud. Not angry, just full.
Conversations overlapped. The television competed with arguments about dinner. Someone was always calling my name. There was always something happening.
My mother was often silent.
Not cold. Not angry. Just quiet.
She moved through the house like a still pond—steady, unhurried, undemanding. Being near her felt like permission to stop bracing. Her silence wasn’t an absence of something; it was the presence of something else.
Calm.
Safety.
A space where I didn’t have to perform or explain.
So I found pockets of quiet.
Early mornings before everyone else woke. The walk to school through empty streets. The hour after my homework was finished when the house finally became still.
In those moments, silence felt like permission.
Permission to stop performing.
Permission to let my shoulders drop.
Permission to simply exist without being asked for something.
I didn’t know then that I was building an association.
I only knew that when the world got too loud, I could find quiet and feel better.
But I also knew people who felt the opposite.
A friend in school couldn’t bear a silent room. If the conversation lagged, she filled it with nervous chatter. If her boyfriend went quiet, she assumed she’d done something wrong.
She told me once that silence in her house meant her father was angry.
His quiet was the most dangerous sound there was because it meant he was building up to something.
For her, silence was never peace.
It was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Same silence. Different stories.
The silence itself hasn’t changed.
What we’ve attached to it has.
We spend our lives collecting associations.
They’re not necessarily intellectual decisions. They’re patterns laid down through repetition, through experiences that imprinted themselves before we had the words to question them.
If quiet was present during safety—reading beside a grandparent, walking through a forest, sitting beside a silent mother who asked nothing of you—then silence can become a sanctuary.
A place to rest.
But if silence meant someone was angry, if it followed a slammed door or a parent’s withdrawal, if it stretched for hours while you waited for something unpleasant to happen, then the same quiet can trigger a completely different response.
One person hears:
Everything is okay.
Another hears:
Something is wrong.
Neither person is necessarily wrong.
They are simply interpreting the present through a lens shaped by their past.
This is one of the strangest and most fascinating things about being human.
We don’t experience life exactly as it happens.
We experience it through everything we have already learned about what things mean.
A raised voice can mean danger to one person and passionate enthusiasm to another.
Being alone can feel like freedom to one person and abandonment to another.
Criticism can feel like an opportunity to grow—or confirmation that we’re not good enough.
Uncertainty can feel exciting to one person and threatening to another.
And silence can be either a sanctuary or a threat.
The difficult part is that these associations can become deeply embedded.
You can’t always reason your way out of them.
Someone can tell you, “There’s nothing to worry about,” and intellectually, you might believe them.
But your shoulders stay tight.
Your breath stays shallow.
Something inside you still whispers:
This is how it starts.
That’s because associations aren’t simply ideas that we can swap out whenever we want.
They are pathways worn deep through years of repetition and experience.
Changing them takes more than a reassuring sentence.
But they can change.
What was learned can be relearned.
Not by force.
Not by pretending the past didn’t happen.
And not by telling ourselves that we shouldn’t feel the way we feel.
Sometimes change comes from slowly accumulating new experiences that contradict the old story.
A person who has always associated silence with conflict can experience quiet with someone who isn’t angry and gradually discover that silence doesn’t always lead to an explosion.
Someone who learned that being alone meant abandonment can spend an evening by themselves and realise they aren’t being rejected.
They’re simply alone.
The absence of noise does not have to mean the presence of danger.
Eventually, something remarkable can happen.
The present begins teaching the nervous system something the past never did.
This is different.
You’re safe.
Nothing bad is happening.
You don’t have to brace yourself anymore.
Gradually, through small and repeated experiences, a new association can form.
Silence becomes something else.
Perhaps even something beautiful.
And this applies to far more than silence.
We carry meanings we never consciously chose—assigned to us by family, culture, relationships, and painful experiences—and we can carry them for so long that they begin to feel like objective truths.
Failure means I’m incapable.
Asking for help means I’m weak.
Changing direction means I’ve failed.
Uncertainty means I’m unsafe.
Rest means I’m being unproductive.
Being alone means I’m unwanted.
These can feel like facts.
But often they’re interpretations.
Stories we’ve learned.
And while we can’t always choose the stories we first learned, we can eventually question whether we want to keep telling them.
Sometimes the greatest personal growth comes from discovering that the meaning we gave something isn’t the only meaning it can have.
The same event can be understood differently.
The same experience can be felt differently.
The same silence can say something new.
I still appreciate silence.
But now I also recognise that my appreciation isn’t universal.
It’s not necessarily the “correct” way to experience silence.
It’s simply mine.
It was shaped by my experiences—by a childhood where quiet could be a refuge rather than a warning, and where my mother’s silence could make the world feel a little less overwhelming.
When I meet someone who becomes uncomfortable in silence, I try not to say:
“Just relax.”
Instead, I try to remember that their silence may be speaking a different language.
What feels peaceful to me may feel threatening to them.
What feels like freedom to me may feel like abandonment to someone else.
And perhaps that’s an important lesson in understanding other people.
We are often reacting not only to what is happening, but to what we have learned that it means.
You don’t have to deny your past.
You don’t have to pretend that something didn’t hurt.
You don’t have to suddenly feel differently.
But you can become curious.
Why does this make me feel this way?
Where did I learn that this is what it means?
Is that meaning still serving me?
Could there be another way of experiencing this?
Those questions don’t erase the past.
They simply create a little space between what happened then and what is happening now.
And sometimes that space is where freedom begins.
Because perhaps changing ourselves isn’t always about becoming someone different.
Perhaps sometimes it’s about discovering that something we have believed for years was never a universal truth in the first place.
It was simply a meaning we learned.
And what was learned can be relearned.
The silence remains silent.
But eventually, you may find that it no longer says what you once thought it said.
And that quiet—once heavy with old warnings—can become, for the first time, simply quiet.
