Let me pipe up real quick.

I used to think silence meant peace.

No yelling, no cussing, no doors slamming—so I told myself everything was fine.
That’s what you do when you’re young. You confuse quiet with safe.
But the truth? That silence was just a different kind of violence.
A slow starvation of the soul.

Nobody said "I love you."
Nobody said "I'm proud of you."
Nobody said anything.

And that kind of silence? It don’t keep the peace. It just keeps you small.

You grow up learning how to hold things in.
How to take pain like it’s normal.
How to flinch at kindness because it feels foreign.

You start building walls not because you're strong—but because no one ever taught you how to live without them.

People say they miss the “quiet homes” they grew up in.
I say I survived them.

Because silence that doesn’t make space for healing, for check-ins, for love—it’s not peace.
It’s just neglect that learned how to stay quiet.

And now, I catch myself doing it.
Shutting down when I’m hurt.
Ghosting when I’m overwhelmed.
Calling it “peace” when really, I just don’t feel safe opening up.

That’s why I write.
Because I never had the words handed to me—I had to build them.
And now I write so some other man out there doesn’t have to feel crazy for feeling too much in a world that taught him to feel nothing.

I write because there are men like me—quiet in public, loud in their heads—waiting to hear someone say what they’ve been carrying.

I write because silence raised me, but it won’t raise the version of me I’m becoming.
And I write to build a bridge for the ones still stuck in that quiet house, thinking nobody hears them.

Because I do.
And maybe through these words—they’ll hear themselves too.

Remember. We all carry something but here you don’t have to carry it alone.

If you are like me and do a lot of reflecting, I can help you. I made a 7 day Pipe Up Reflections Journal that's free to download.

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