a map of not-yet-broken silence

here's an activity to uncover the places where your voice has gotten stuck--and where your work for relational freedom starts

Hi, beloved.

In my last post, I wrote about how the places where our voices still catch may be places where we’re not quite free. And I unpacked three key questions from Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” to help us start the search for silences in need of breaking:

1. What words do you not yet have?

2. What do you need to say?

3. What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

Today, I’m offering a silence-mapping exercise for paid subscribers that can help you find clarity on those questions and take stock of the spaces and relationships where something has been left unspoken.

When you know that terrain, you can make more intentional choices in response. You don’t have to break every silence at once—but after finishing your map, I’d invite you to choose one place to practice making the hard thing known.

And silence-breaking is a practice, not a one-time event. The goal is to set a new pattern of courage, agency, and integrity where we’ve been trained to swallow our own voices.

That’s not work to do alone. So as you make your map, I’d encourage you to also consider the human and non-human supports you can call in to help make it happen—and to help with the waves of vulnerability and self-doubt that almost always follow a moment of speaking and acting in a new way.

Making your Map

1. Get a large piece of paper or a poster board and any pens, markers, or other materials you like to work with.

2. Draw a large island in the center of your paper. The island will represent your outward-facing social life—all the places where you use (or don’t use) your voice. The ocean around it will represent your vast inner world of feelings and emotions and impulses and ideas, all the things you translate into language when you speak.