By Addison Van

Silence becomes its own kind of violence.

The corner booth at the local Thai place holds me the way it always has. The vinyl seat beneath me, worn and cracked, is familiar against my legs. A small tear in the fabric catches on my jeans as I shift. Overhead lights hum, dim but somehow too bright, casting everything in a fluorescent pallor. Around us, there’s a quiet clinking of silverware, a shuffle of plates, and conversations I can’t quite hear. Lunch specials and years of sitting in the same spot should make honesty easy. But it doesn’t. My best friend sits across from me, and I am somewhere else entirely, folded into myself like paper.

“How are you?”

The question hangs in the air like an offering. My body answers for me: shoulders collapsed inward, curving my spine into something small. Eyes that haven’t known rest in weeks, heavy and burning. A face that looks like it’s been holding back floodwaters. My mouth betrays it all.

“I’m good.”

My mouth feels dry. Metallic. Like I’ve been holding my breath underwater. I open it, close it. The words are there; I can feel them pressing against the back of my teeth, fully formed and desperate, but they won’t come. My throat constricts. Nothing comes out. It’s a translation error. The fluency in my head never makes it past my throat. The pad thai in front of me sits untouched, the steam rising and dissipating.

I should eat. I should speak. I do neither.

I learned to count everything. The seconds ticking by. Thirteen breaths. Four bites taken. I never stop running the math.

This is all I’ve ever known. My parents bury their pain like it’s something to be hidden, handled alone, and never named aloud.

I remember the silence after my grandfather died. The car ride home from the funeral was forty minutes of nothing. My mother was in the passenger seat, her face doing the work of holding the grief in. Tears were wiped away before they could fall, quick and efficient, like she was erasing evidence. My father’s stoic jaw was set like concrete, fists choking the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. I sat in the back, watching the tendons in his hands, the careful blankness of my mother’s profile. The house felt like a held breath when we got home — everyone was waiting for someone else to break first. No one did. We just moved through the rooms like ghosts, opening cupboards and closing them, sitting down and standing up, performing the motions of living without the substance of it.

I watched and learned: this is how we do it. We don’t fall apart. We don’t make our pain anyone else’s problem.

I don’t remember being taught the rules. I just remember knowing them.

Don’t complain. Don’t need too much. Be grateful, con.

And I am grateful. That’s the thing. Gratitude and drowning can live in the same body. But somewhere along the way, I learned that only one of them was allowed to speak. You can’t speak when there’s water in your lungs.

I’ve been conducting comparative mathematics my whole life. I count the roof over my head. Food was always on the table, never a question of whether there would be enough. College was paid for, tuition checks were written without hesitation. My parents provided even when they couldn’t provide their own peace. 

I remember sitting at the kitchen table, fourteen years old, drowning in homework I couldn’t finish. AP World History problems blurred together. My English notes might as well have been written in a foreign language. Past 2 a.m., my mother found me there, face buried in books and assignments, holding back my frustration and tears.

“I can’t do this,” I said. My voice cracked. “It’s too much.”

She stood in the doorway for a long moment, backlit by the hallway light, her face half cast in shadow. Then she sat down across from me.

“When I was your age, I walked for hours to and back from school every day. Your father worked in the fields before class, his hands raw and bleeding. We would have given anything for the opportunities you have.”

Her voice wasn’t cruel. It was matter-of-fact. It was a statement of truth. She wasn’t trying to hurt me, but something in me learned to be quiet after that. The homework didn’t get easier. The overwhelm didn’t lift. The weight in my chest didn’t go anywhere — I just stopped saying it out loud. I learned that my stress was a luxury I didn’t deserve to claim; that struggling with the life they’d built for me was ungrateful; that complaining about being given everything meant I deserved nothing.

Silence becomes its own kind of violence.

My pain, divided by my privilege, rounds down to nothing.

I started running calculations I never asked to learn. Measuring my right to hurt against an invisible standard I could never meet. My parents left behind everything they knew. They gave up their dreams, so I could have mine.

How dare I say it hurts when they sacrificed everything?

Every you should be grateful built another wall between me and my own voice. I learned to catch myself mid-sentence. To bite down on the words before they became complaints. My parents would ask how I was doing, and I’d feel the truth rising in my throat. Then, I’d feel my jaw clench, my teeth press together, and out would come:
“I’m good.”

The lie smooth as river stone. Practiced. Automatic. The real answer stayed lodged somewhere behind my sternum, calcifying into something I couldn’t reach for anymore even if I wanted to.

Bodies keep their own accounts. Mine started refusing the math. Three hours of sleep on a good night. Zero meals finished in a week. Seven days since I felt like myself. The body keeps better records than the mind wants to admit. Nights spent staring at the ceiling, counting hours until sunrise. Food tasted like nothing. A heaviness in my chest made breathing feel like work, like my ribs were made of lead. It was the drowning I couldn’t name because I was never technically underwater.


Later in that same booth — fluorescent lights still humming, his eyes still waiting, patient in a way I don’t deserve — the words find their way out. Not because I decided to speak, but because my body couldn’t hold it anymore. My voice breaks on the first real word, my hands shake against the table. I say too much, or not enough, or both. The words come out wrong, fractured, not the careful explanation I’d rehearsed in my head.

What remains isn’t peace. It’s the strange grief of being heard and still feeling alone. Of speaking the truth and finding it doesn’t change the fact that I still don’t know if I’m allowed to claim it.

But my friend just listened and nodded. The math didn’t add up the way I expected. No one corrected my equation.

The pad thai in front of me has gone cold. I pick up my fork anyway. Take a bite. It doesn’t taste like nothing anymore. It doesn’t taste very good either. Just present. Real.

I take another bite. Count: one, two, three. Different math this time. Not measuring my right to eat, to take up space, to feel what I’m feeling. Just counting because the rhythm helps. Because I’m here. Because I’m trying.

It’s not relief I feel. It’s not resolution. It’s just learning to hold two truths at once: I am grateful, and yet, I am drowning. Both can be real. Both can take up space in the same body, in the same breath.

I take another bite. Another breath. Slowly learning to give both feelings air. ■