I have observed it in others and noticed it in myself: a discomfort with silence.
I am not afraid of silence in general. At times it is like music. Exceptions are cases where I write to someone and get no response; that can be uncomfortable, particularly if I have revealed personal information that I had doubts about sharing.
The void between me and the recipient then becomes a place which my imagination goes to work trying to fill: Maybe I said too much, made my acquaintance uncomfortable. Maybe I was misunderstood. It is an annoying trait of my brain that it tries so hard to interpret silence, as if something could be deduced from nothing.
But recently I saw this principle work from the other side. On Twitter I wrote a post about my cat. I believe it was something like: “Never trust a skulking cat who keeps peaking around corners, especially if you have bare ankles that could be mistaken for prey.”
A man on Twitter responded, and I responded back. The conversation was light banter about cats and their aggressive propensities, and how it felt to be the victim of an adorable furry blood-thirsty predator.
The communication was in real time and going fine, but after about three tweets, the conversation took a strange turn. It became uncomfortably personal, and the responder seemed to be making some weird and baseless assumptions about me.
I am usually okay with people saying weird things. I am sure I have said my share of them. But the person on Twitter who had said a weird thing rendered me speechless. That is, I did a thorough search into my memory vaults and plumbed the far corners of my imagination for an appropriate response, and came up with nothing.
I stared at the message and blinked a few times. How to respond? It was my bedtime. I was sleepy. I decided I would figure it out in the morning and went to bed.
But the next morning, I checked my Twitter feed to see a jolting message from my follower: “Let me put it this way. I was not attacked by a cat but by a human, in which case it had no effect on me.” I stared at the message. What did it mean? Was he saying that because I did not respond to him the night before, I meant to attack him like a predatory cat? How was doing nothing and saying nothing an attack?
I considered informing him that I do not live in Twitter-verse. I have a real life, in which I do things like sleep. He knew nothing about me, and my end of the conversation had consisted solely of a few tweets about my cat. Besides, I had planned to say something in response before he essentially accused me of cat-mauling him.
But, although I was unhappy with his message, a part of me could imagine how he might have felt. He had said something weird and I had failed to validate him for it with a response, leaving him to imagine one.
How many times had I been on the other side of the situation? How many times, throughout my life, have I written to someone something personal I thought at the time was clever or moving, only to get no response at all? Or to go back and discover that what sounded charming at 4:00 a.m. when I wrote the message was not nearly as adorable or deep as I had imagined?
Not many, to be honest. After only a few times of having this experience, I learned to be careful about what I said.
It was intolerable to listen to my own words echoing back to me in my head as I imagined things that could have gone wrong – even though there are infinite reasons having nothing to do with me why someone might not respond, from a headache to a family emergency.
But telling that to my OCD is not as effective as I would like it to be. Even after I release a tweet or a blog, I am intensely uncomfortable until someone responds. I imagine my thoughts, encapsulated in words, drifting around, exposed, friendless, in the cold void of cyberspace.
During those empty moments, every insecurity I have ever had since I was bullied in sixth grade gathers into a knot inside my chest. Did I reveal too much? Offend somehow? Did I say something that got misunderstood?
How often I have cursed the part of me that thinks these thoughts, the part that is driven fill the empty canvas of silence with my worst imaginings in order to relieve my anxiety.
That being said, I have never accused anyone of attacking me by not responding to something I wrote or by delaying a response. I do realize that people get busy and have other things going on.
Besides, as early as elementary school, I was made to feel guilty about being quiet. I was called a snob. It was assumed by some that I must not say what I was thinking because I was harboring critical thoughts about my accusers, when I was actually just exceedingly shy.
Whatever else silence may be, silence is not violence, although it may feel that way sometimes. There are few conclusions that can be reliably drawn from nothing. People have their own lives and worries, and writing messages online takes time, thought, and energy.
But I hated to leave anyone in the limbo of no response, knowing how uncomfortable it can be. However, I was unhappy with the accusatory nature of the Twitter message, which had seemed to assume that I had, with malice aforethought, shot a salvo of silence into cyberspace with the intention of inflicting violence and pain.
I generally go out of my way not to hurt people, and someone who could so quickly assume the worst of someone they had just met was not high on my list of on-line friendship candidates. I have bipolar disorder, and I can be deeply affected by that sort of thing. The comment had upset me.
I did not want to explain or defend my actions as if I had something to apologize for, and I did not want to let myself be provoked into responding angrily. In the end, I did the only thing that made sense to me.
I remained silent.