Speaking Without Words: Silence, Inner Voice and Lines of the Void

Some sentences lose something when spoken out loud.

Some truths can only be understood in silence.

While writing Lines of the Void, I realised this in a painfully clear way:

I was someone who lived by talking, yet my deepest transformations almost always happened in the periods when I was silent.

Is it possible to express without speaking?

Is silence really “nothingness”, or is it the place where the inner voice finally becomes audible?

Meditation, contemplation, mindfulness…

Beyond all these concepts, I am curious about the story of the naked contact a human being makes with their own inner space.

What does silence actually silence?

When we hear the word silence, most of us imagine the same scene:

No sound, no noise, no talking.

A peaceful emptiness.

Yet in my experience, silence is not peace at first, but rather a disturbing intensity.

When the outer sounds withdraw, everything that has been postponed for years inside starts to speak.

Unfinished sentences, suppressed anger, postponed decisions, unacknowledged losses, swallowed cries…

Silence is actually not a field that silences the noise outside, but one that refuses to silence what is hidden inside.

That is why “being quiet” does not bring peace for most people.

On the contrary, because it causes the inner voice to rise, it feels frightening.

For me the turning point was this:

One day I realised that I was not afraid of silence itself; I was afraid of my inner world that would become visible in silence.

Inner voice: as if it had been silenced but never stopped speaking…

What we call the “inner voice” does not have to be a mystical concept.

Sometimes it is very simple:

“Something is wrong here.”

“I don’t want this.”

“This is not me.”

“I am tired here.”

“This place is not good for me.”

But modern life does not really allow us to hear this voice.

There are thousands of sounds produced to fill every empty space.

Notifications, content, conversations, music, arguments, news…

A rhythm built to prevent us from being alone with ourselves.

In fact, the inner voice does not completely disappear in this crowd.

It just turns into a whisper.

Sometimes it becomes a stomach ache, sometimes insomnia, sometimes a vague restlessness, sometimes a “reasonless” fatigue.

While writing Lines of the Void, I had to follow that whisper.

Because all the concepts, theories and knowledge inside me worked only up to a point; then, at some stage, my inner voice began to say just one thing:

“Stop now.”

Stop so that you can hear.

Stop so that you can see.

Stop so that you can stop bypassing yourself and actually encounter yourself.

Much has been written about meditation.

Contemplation has been described at length in different traditions.

Mindfulness has almost turned into a commercial term.

For me, however, at the core of these words there is one single scene:

A human being slowly inclining towards themselves.

Meditation is not necessarily sitting in lotus pose for hours.

Contemplation is not only thinking about sacred texts.

Mindfulness is not constantly policing your mind with “What am I feeling right now?”

Sometimes meditation is simply really drinking a single sip of water in the morning and noticing the coolness in your body.

Sometimes contemplation is lying awake at night staring at the ceiling and not running away from the question, “What am I turning into?”

Sometimes mindfulness is honestly admitting that the numbness you call inner peace is in fact a suppressed anger.

So silence is not an empty space, but a room opened so that you can meet yourself.

Some parts of Lines of the Void actually dripped out of long periods of silence.

There were times when I did not write a single sentence for days and only wandered around inside myself.

In that silence, at first I felt as if nothing was happening.

Then slowly I realised this:

While nothing was happening outside, a lot was happening inside me.

There are places where speaking can silence too…

There are also places where a person does not shut up and yet remains silent.

Where we talk a lot and say nothing, explain a lot and never open up, express a lot and never surrender.

Speaking is sometimes used not to touch the content, but to cover the pain that carries that content.

The sentence “Let’s solve it by talking” is not always genuine.

Sometimes it is the polite version of “Let’s talk it away so we don’t have to face it.”

In my own life, I explained some things so many times that, after a while, speaking became more a way of running away than of healing.

Every new sentence was like a fresh layer of polish spread over an old wound.

It shone, but the pain underneath was the same.

That is why, for a time, I cut down on speaking.

Instead of explaining, I tried to look; instead of interpreting, to feel; instead of explaining myself, to accompany myself.

Silence then began to turn from a punishment into a form of compassion.

Inner peace is not the state where everything is fine…

When we think of silence and meditation, we usually imagine the same scene:

A calm face, an easy breath, a soft inner peace.

But the inner peace I experienced mostly did not arrive like that.

First came turmoil.

The urge to cry, anger, regret, anxiety, a sense of constriction.

When I remained silent, all the emotions accumulated in my body seemed to line up.

“Now see me too,

me, the one you have been pushing away for years,

look at me as well.”

Inner peace is not, as we sometimes think, “feeling nothing”.

On the contrary, it comes when a space opens wide enough for you to feel everything you have been avoiding.

The place where I could say this to myself was exactly there:

“Yes, I am not okay right now, and still I am not going to abandon myself.”

The strongest effect meditation, contemplation and mindfulness left on me was not a state of “happiness”, but a determination to stay with myself.

Inner peace is sometimes not a feeling passing away, but the courage to sit with it.

Awareness: not constantly watching yourself, but being willing to hear yourself.

The word awareness has been used so much that it now sometimes turns into a tiring command:

“Observe every moment.

Analyse every feeling.

Track every thought.”

Yet after a while this can turn into an inner policing.

An inner inspector that records everything and lets nothing simply flow.

I now understand awareness a little differently:

Not constantly watching yourself, but being willing to hear yourself.

That is, when you catch yourself, not pouncing on yourself once again without mercy.

When you notice what you feel, not trying to change it immediately.

When you see your mind speeding up, being soft enough to say, instead of blaming yourself, “Okay, this is how I am right now.”

While writing Lines of the Void, I saw how harsh my inner dialogues could sometimes be.

The way I spoke to myself was more ruthless than I would ever speak to anyone else.

In this sense, silence became a mirror:

When I did not speak, I clearly heard what my inner voice was saying to me.

And I must confess, living with that voice was far more exhausting than the noise of the outer world.

Then slowly I tried something different:

Instead of trying to silence that inner voice, I tried to change its tone.

In the place of “You failed again,” I tried to plant a voice that could say, “You’re having a hard time right now, and that is deeply human.”

At that point, awareness turned into a quiet practice of inner compassion.

Speaking without words: the silent side of Lines of the Void

Lines of the Void is made of words, yes.

But the real weight of this book often hides in what the words do not say.

In the spaces between them.

In the places where the sentence ends but the feeling does not.

In the moment when the reader begins to hear their own inner voice.

While writing, I constantly felt this:

If I tell everything, nothing will truly have been told.

Some things are genuine only when they rise from within the reader themselves.

I can only draw a line; the emptiness has to be filled by them.

This is why silence, for me, is a space both inside the text and around it.

I try to think of a sentence together with the silence around it:

What I do not say is no less important than what I say.

Perhaps speaking without words is something like this:

Leaving room for the reader’s own inner voice.

Do not be afraid of silence, there is someone waiting for you there…

I am not writing this to say, “Don’t talk, be quiet, withdraw into your inner world, the outer world doesn’t matter.”

The world needs sound, words, expression.

But when all of this is done without ever meeting ourselves, it becomes hollow inside.

Silence, therefore, does not have to be an escape; it can be a short space of return.

A space where you step back and can ask, “What am I really feeling right now?”, where you allow yourself to hear your inner voice, where you sit with yourself for a while.

If lately everything feels like too much talking, too much explaining, too much telling; and despite all that you feel misunderstood, perhaps the next step is not a new sentence.

Perhaps the next step is a brief silence.

Even if it looks as if no one is there, know that someone is waiting for you there:

The version of you that you have been hiding from yourself.

Silence may not be the place you run away from them, but the place where you finally meet their eyes.

And sometimes the greatest transformations do not begin after a single sentence, but after a single moment of not speaking.