Deafening Silence

Some parts of it you get used to. Low numbers, few voices, unspoken demands. The darkness. But when it goes completely silent, it allows your mind to go to dark places.

I know what I'm doing. I'm good at it. I've been praised for my skills over the years and I know, without bragging, that I can create magic out of nothing. Despite nature my doubts about myself, I know that I can do this.

But the silence. The silence that threatens to consume and unnerve me, upsetting the delicate balance of my sanity as I just try to make it through another day.

It started slowly. Where once before sights would assault my eyes, nearly blinding me, things began to dim. No brightly colored lights surrounding shocks of hair and foreheads. No backlit shapes betraying hints of humanity. No blurs of motion to distract me.

Then the sounds stopped. No dogs barking. No vacuums. No pounding bass. No TV blasting commercials for prescription medicine. No screaming or laughing children. No shouted conversations.

I got used to the darkness. It became an old friend, almost a comfort. It just made sense, seeing nothing but the darkness day by day. Occasionally the light would appear, a fleeting moment to my eyes that was soon gone again. I embraced the familiarity of the darkness, till it became just another part of my life. I spoke of the darkness as a normality, just something that happened and was unlikely to change.

But on this day, the silence consumed me. The questions started coming from within, rather than their rightful place of outside of me. I wondered what I had done wrong. What could I change, what could I fix? What hoops would I need to jump through to make the silence stop? What had I done to earn this scorn, this rejection, this deafening silence? How could I make it end?

Answers were not quick in coming. In fact, they didn't come at all.

I endured the darkness, the silence, until the time arrived when I could fall, exhausted, into my bed where I could find another type of silence; the kind found when my mind could escape the things that dragged me into the darkness and celebrate the moments of light in my life. A blissful silence, filled with happiness and rest rather than discomfort and frustration. The tears that had been held at bay were released, watering the sweetness of my pillow and allowing me to drift off.

When I awoke an hour later, I was rather embarrassed of myself. My overactive imagination had taken the stresses of my daily life and compounded them, running rampant in the space that the silence allowed and pushing me to my breaking point. But now, in the brightness of the late afternoon, I remembered two very important things:

1. It's Monday.

2. It's the week before Spring Break and everyone (teachers included!) is completely over school.

So despite my weariness, my desire to not go through all of that again, I got up to prepare my lesson for tomorrow. I pushed away the sadness and disappointment that comes when your students neither turn on their cameras nor unmute themselves or even type in the chat and focused instead on trying to create an engaging lesson.

Because I'm a teacher in the middle of a pandemic and online school is, unfortunately, my way of life now. My only hope is that my students and I can push through the collective exhaustion and make it until the end of the week so that we can enjoy the well-earned rest of Spring Break.

Maybe tomorrow, the silence won't be so deafening.