When Silence Becomes Action
“Your silence will not protect you.”
These piercing words come from Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist, poet, and civil rights activist who wrote one of the most urgent essays on identity and illness ever published.
In The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, published in 1984, she reminds us:
“We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”
She writes that the act of speaking—of naming what is real—can feel dangerous.
But the cost of silence is far greater.
Lorde recounts a moment with her daughter:
“You’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out… and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder… and if you don’t speak it out one day, it will just up and punch you in the mouth.”
These words cracked something open in me.
They gave me the courage to tell my own story—honestly, plainly, without defense.
To bear witness to what I lived, and what I lost.
Since doing so, I’ve received hundreds of messages.
People writing to share their own suffering. Their hidden stories. Their unspoken truths.
It’s been beautiful. And humbling.
It is human.
Because when one person dares to speak from the silence, it creates space for others to do the same.
What are the words you do not have yet?
What do you need to say?
What are the tyrannies you swallow day after day and attempt to make your own—until you sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Sing your pain. ❤️🩹
That’s how we begin to heal.
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