WHAT SILENCE TOOK FROM ME

Week 6 of 17 — INHERITANCE: The Audacity of Still Being Here

The room was always silent. I just finally stopped pretending it wasn’t. (UNSPUN Studio, Week 6 of 17—INHERITANCE: The Audacity of Still Being Here)

“To be told you’re loved is to be offered wings, a door, a destination. But to be shown love? That’s the final word.”
—Ocean Vuong

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WHAT SILENCE TOOK FROM ME

There is something ancient about learning to lie for your life.

About becoming fluent in the language of survival, where truth becomes the thing that could kill you and silence becomes the thing that keeps you breathing. We have always known this—the ones who carry secrets in our blood, who learn early that some truths are too dangerous for daylight. What we're only beginning to understand is how silence, once learned, becomes its own kind of virus. How it replicates. How it spreads through years, through families, through the space between what we carry and what we're brave enough to name.

Learning to Lie—Silence as a Full-Time Job

To lie was to learn a new language—one where every verb meant survival and every noun meant risk.

To fabricate was to step into a role and never forget my lines. Never break character. Never let them see the boy underneath the performance.

I did not just have to say I needed help. I had to become need itself. I had to hollow myself out and fill the space with the kind of desperation that would convince them to bend rules, to make exceptions, to see me as worthy of the loophole.

Ryan White was not a loophole. It was a test. A system built for those with no other options, which meant I had to make myself an optionless man. Which meant I had to erase every other possibility from my story until only one remained: the one that would keep me alive.

I learned how to give them just enough truth to make the lie believable. Learned what they needed to hear, what they needed to see—the specific kind of brokenness that would move them to action. Learned that survival was a performance, and I was the actor and the playwright and the only audience that mattered.