Silence

What’s something most people don’t know about you?

For most of my life, I mistook silence for loneliness. Growing up in the noise of south Louisiana and then in Appalachia and later in the hum of academic halls, I filled every pause with words—lectures, stories, advice, anything to keep the quiet at bay. Silence was a void, a mirror I didn’t want to face. When I became a therapist, I learned to hold it for others but never for myself. I could sit in another’s pain with compassion, but when it came to my own, I spoke too quickly, too often.

It wasn’t until I came to Ireland that silence stopped feeling like absence. Out on the water, hauling crab pots beneath a bruised dawn, or standing alone along the cliffs where the wind drowns every thought, I began to understand. Silence isn’t the opposite of sound—it’s what gives sound its meaning. It’s not a void, but a vessel. It’s where all the unspoken things—love, grief, wonder—find their shape.

That stillness became my teacher. It taught me that I don’t have to fill every moment, fix every feeling, or find the right word. It taught me that listening—truly listening—to the sea, to others, to my own weary soul, is sometimes the most honest act a person can offer.

So, what most people don’t know about me is this: I used to fear silence, and now I need it. It’s in the quiet that I find the pulse of who I am—the man, the writer, the wanderer still learning to be at peace with his own story.