There is a kind of silence that looks like wisdom.
It shows up as restraint. As discernment. As knowing when not to say too much. For Black and Brown folks especially, silence has often been a strategy — one that kept us alive in rooms that were never built for our truth.
But there is another kind of silence.
The kind that lives in the body.
The silence that tightens your chest right when you’re about to write the sentence that matters.
The silence that makes you abandon projects right before they’re finished.
The silence that convinces you to sand down your language, soften your edges and translate yourself so no one feels uncomfortable.
This episode is about that silence.
When Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you,” she wasn’t offering a motivational quote. She was naming a truth she lived with full awareness of the risks. She knew silence could feel like safety — and she also knew how often it failed to deliver on that promise.
What many writers call “writer’s block” is often something deeper: a nervous system response shaped by memory. Not only personal memory, but inherited memory. The body remembering what happened the last time truth cost someone something — belonging, safety, work, love.
Memory doesn’t live in the calendar.
It lives in the body.
So when your body hesitates, freezes or shuts down before you write the real thing, it’s not betraying you. It’s protecting you with old information.
The work isn’t forcing yourself to speak.
It’s listening honestly to what your fear is trying to tell you.
Some silences were necessary.
Some were strategic.
And some — quietly, painfully — have expired.
This episode invites you to notice which silences you’re still carrying that no longer serve you. To sit with them. To witness them. To begin offering your body new evidence that it may be safe enough now to speak — slowly, gently, on your own terms.
If you felt something shift while listening — tightening, softening, recognition — it’s likely because silence isn’t the only wound at work. It’s usually layered with others.
That’s why I created a free guide called The 3 Wounds Blocking Your Writing. It’s a diagnostic — not a pep talk — and designed to help you identify where silence, worthiness and performance culture are shaping your writing practice so you can work with them instead of fighting yourself.
Not all silence needs to be broken.
But the silence that keeps you small, hollows out your work and belongs to somebody else’s fear?
That silence will not protect you.
Listen. Witness. Practice.
With love and fire,
Lakeisha, High Priestess
