What Poetry Taught Me About Surviving Silence

As a child, silence felt like safety.

I did not tell anyone about the abuse.

When the truth finally came out, it was not because I found the courage to speak it. Someone else had told.

And suddenly, everything that had lived quietly inside of me was no longer quiet.

There were hospitals. Doctors. Nurses.

Questions I did not know how to answer.

Adults trying to make sense of things no child should ever have to explain.

I remember chaos. I remember my mother crying. I remember her anger. Her helplessness. Her heartbreak.

My father lived in another state, and I know now that she must have felt powerless in ways I could not understand as a child.

She was young.

She was a good mother.

And now, as a woman myself, I cannot imagine what it must have felt like for her to discover that someone she trusted had hurt her child.

I do not think anyone around me intentionally taught me to stay silent.

The truth is…

The adults around me did not really know how to handle what had happened either.

They were carrying battles I could not yet see.

Traumas I could not yet understand.

Family histories I would not fully uncover until I became an adult myself.

And one of the hardest truths I have had to face is that my father carried his own silence too.

He knew pain.

He knew trauma.

He knew what it meant to bury things so deeply that eventually they begin shaping the way you move through the world.

And unfortunately, he did not know how to deal with that pain either.

There is a saying that hurt people, hurt people.

As painful as that truth can be…

I have come to understand that there is often history beneath the hurt.

Silence beneath the damage.

Wounds beneath the wounds.

As an adult, I no longer carry bitterness toward him.

I have forgiven him.

And perhaps one of the most beautiful parts of my story is that he is no longer that man either.

He chose to face the silences he carried.

He chose to heal. And over time, I have watched him become a better man. A better father. A different man than the one pain once created.

That does not erase what happened.

But it reminds me of something I now believe with my whole heart:

People can change.

Cycles can break.

Silence does not have to be inherited forever.

And somewhere in all of that pain…

I learned that silence hurt less than watching everyone else hurt.

I learned that silence protected people.

I learned that silence kept the peace.

And back then…

People did not talk about these things. Not openly. Not honestly. Not the way we are beginning to now.

So silence became more than quiet. It became shame.

Because when no one speaks of something…

A child begins to believe it must be unspeakable.

And if it is unspeakable…

Maybe it is shameful.

So I carried it.

Quietly.

For years.

And the truth is…

Silence never suddenly became painful.

It always was. It was safety. It was shame. It was grief. It was survival. All of it… at once.

Then I found poetry. Or maybe poetry found me.

And through words, I began trying to understand things I was far too young to process.

I began looking through the silence with my own lens. Trying to name feelings I did not yet understand. Trying to make sense of wounds I did not know how to speak aloud.

That is why so many of my earliest poems were already so dark.

So deep. So heavy.

I was only a child…

Trying to make meaning out of things adults themselves often struggle to understand.

And if I could say anything now to that little girl who believed silence would save her…

I would tell her this:

She is magic.

And she did her best.

The silence she kept was how she survived.

None of what happened to her was ever her fault.

None of it.

And I am grateful she survived.

Because I know now…

There were so many moments when she could have given up.

And somehow…

She didn’t.

— Jennifer Rene Wallace