More About Silencing

After Miss Larkin kicked me out of my seventh grade class, other teachers heard about the ‘little Communist’ at Hamilton Junior High and were appalled. Several no longer called on me in class; others derided the ideas I shared if they did. Suddenly my best friend, , Susan, stopped returning my phone calls. Her mother would always tell me she wasn’t home and she began to avoid me in school. Other kids followed suit. I had no one to eat lunch with, no one to talk to about homework assignments, and no one to share my confusion with about what was happening. I started to feel sick when I awakened in the morning, and often wanted to stay home from school. When I stayed home too many days in a semester, those same teachers would lower my grade although I always completed my work, which made me more miserable. . Finally my parents moved to a different town where I could ‘start over’. I was very careful about what I said in class there, and barely told anyone what I thought about much of anything until I met Margaret, who is still a dear friend. It wasn’t for many years that I realized how all of this had impacted my life. In work situations I loathed nodding and having no outlet for my mind, to say nothing of my feelings, and quickly chose the arts as my arena. If I expressed my inner self through choreographing dances, most folks wouldn’t have any idea what I was saying anyway. When I was told to change my writing habits in Hollywood and not write ‘soft’ stories, which meant anything about relationships or feelings, I complied with ease. I was used to hiding those things anyway. Did I enjoy the writing that sold? Was that even an issue? In my friendships if I had a thought about a friend’s behavior that I knew she wouldn’t like, I often refrained from sharing it. My fear about losing the friend was much greater than my fear of not being totally honest, although I had been told I was congenitally so by a therapist. I could let that go, couldn’t I, at least in some circumstances? This hiding of the ‘real’ me was rarely true with Margaret over many many years, but it was, and sometimes is, even now, with many new friends. More frequently now I can feel the fear, but I no longer have to silence myself to keep it tamped down. I just allow it to roll on through. In two marriages, however, I often kept quiet about important issues. My first husband would tell me to ‘wallow’ with my female friends, something I don’t think he would do today. He was young too. Now he has to listen to our two daughters when they wallow. That amused me when they were teenagers. If I disagreed with him about something political or even something about his work life, I also kept silent. And when our relationship began to deteriorate, I said even less about anything significant. I remember him telling me in some distress that I was supposed to keep him honest. The very idea makes me smile now. Did I actually sign up for that job? My second husband and I rarely talked about politics because we disagreed about most of what we saw in the world at large. He didn’t want to engage, so I stopped too. I stood up for my kids and for his daughter more easily than I did for myself. By the time we were in real trouble because of the behavior he exhibited when he was drinking, I was again experiencing the familiar feeling of walking on eggshells. Better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing and lose the second one! Of course this made everything worse because I was often angry, and I almost always felt trapped – another familiar feeling. I could go on, but this blog is already quite long. Finally, the worst part about being silent was that it always numbed me out. After my first divorce it took me two years to know what I was feeling about just about anything. Fortunately the thought of going back to that place is more distressing to me than the dangers of speaking out, so no matter how frightened I feel about what I have to say, I say it. If this sparks interest in any of you, I will delve more deeply in another blog post.