Healing the Past: Finding My Voice When No One Is Listening
I have come to see my life as a circle. The closing years echo the opening ones with an unsettling precision, as if time has brought me back to the very place where my struggle began. At seventy, I find myself facing the same central wound that shaped my earliest years: the desperate need to speak, and the equally painful experience of not being heard.
That theme has followed me through every stage of life. It began in infancy, deepened through childhood, twisted itself through adolescence and addiction, and eventually became the driving force behind my spiritual recovery and my life as a writer. What has changed is not the existence of silence around me, but my relationship to it. I no longer write in order to guarantee an audience. I write because the act of expression itself has become an instrument of survival, healing, and self-recognition.
This is the story of how that happened.
The Silence That Shaped Me
Some of the deepest wounds in a human life are formed before language arrives. In my case, the foundations of my consciousness were laid in an atmosphere of distress, exhaustion, and emotional exile.
As an infant, I cried often. My parents, overwhelmed and desperate for rest, responded in a way that would imprint itself on my nervous system for decades. To protect my overworked father’s sleep, they wrapped me in a blanket, carried me into the garage, and left me in the family car for the night.
My frequent bedroom was that car parked in the dark garage.
To an adult, this may sound like an act of frustration. To a child with no language, it becomes a total message about existence itself. The lesson I absorbed was not merely that I had been moved. It was that my cries had no value. My need for comfort was an inconvenience. My voice was not an invitation to connection, but a problem to be removed from sight.
The garage became my first emotional landscape: dark, sealed off, cold, and separate from human warmth. It taught me that expression leads to abandonment. It told me, long before I could understand words, that survival might depend on becoming quiet, invisible, and undemanding.
I did not begin speaking until I was over four years old. That delay was not simply developmental. It felt like the consequence of a psyche that had learned caution at its root. Silence had become protective. Speech had become dangerous.
Even now, I believe that those early nights in the garage formed the original architecture of my inner life.
When Speech Finally Arrived
When language finally came, it did not come gently. It erupted.
After years of repression, my words began pouring out with an almost frantic intensity. Once I learned to speak, I talked incessantly. It was as if some buried reservoir had broken open. I was trying, unconsciously, to make up for lost years. I was trying to prove that I existed.
But my newfound speech did not bring connection. It brought new forms of alienation.
My father often wondered aloud whether I would ever stop talking. At school, I was watched closely, not with deep understanding, but with concern, management, and judgment. I often ended up in the dunce chair at the back of the room. The school district even attempted to prescribe methedrine to quiet me down. I was treated less as a child trying to organize his consciousness and more as a disturbance to be controlled.
My words were abundant, but they rarely built bridges. I was often ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed. One teacher I admired publicly called me a “pseudo-intellectual” during my sophomore year of high school. That label landed with force. It taught me that even my efforts to think deeply and speak seriously could be turned against me. Respect, already fragile, became harder to come by.
Friendships were sparse. Part of that was circumstance; for years I lived remotely from other children. But the deeper issue was that my speech had become chaotic compensation rather than grounded communication. I spoke from hunger, not from inner security. My words did not yet know how to land.
So I learned a painful truth that many wounded people know well: speaking is not the same as being heard. Visibility is not the same as being understood. A child can fill the room with sound and still remain profoundly alone.
The Long Descent into Numbness
The pain of chronic disconnection does not simply disappear. If it is not witnessed, named, and metabolized, it tends to seek another outlet. In my life, that outlet became drug and alcohol abuse.
For sixteen years, I moved through the dark maze of addiction. Substance abuse became my way of managing the unbearable tension between my longing for connection and my expectation of rejection. It dulled the ache. It blurred the old messages. It offered a counterfeit peace.
My addiction was not just chemical. It was existential. It was my attempt to escape a life narrative that felt intolerable to inhabit. The garage had taught me that my cries meant nothing. School had reinforced that my voice was excessive or embarrassing. The world, as I experienced it, did not welcome my natural being. Chemicals allowed me to disappear from that reality for a while.
But numbing comes at a terrible price. It does not heal wounds; it buries them alive. What had begun as relief became its own prison.
By the age of thirty-one, I could no longer survive inside that arrangement. The suffering outgrew the temporary relief. I claimed sobriety for myself and began the long process of spiritual reconstruction.
A Clean Slate, and No Language for It
What happened next remains one of the most profound mysteries of my life.
At thirty-one, in the early years of recovery, I underwent a remarkable spiritual event. The suffocating narrative of my old life seemed to lose its total authority over me. The trauma, the self-hatred, the chemical dependency, the old identity built around pain and alienation—all of it loosened. It was as though the chalkboard of my psyche had been wiped clean.
Very few people are given such an experience. I do not claim to fully understand it. I can only testify to it.
Yet the miracle brought its own torment. I had entered a new inner landscape, but I had no language for what I was living. In that sense, I had become like my younger self again: full of intense inner experience, but unable to explain it. I was awake, sober, transformed—and effectively mute.
The slate was clean, but I had no chalk.
This resemblance to my pre-verbal years was one of the strangest truths of my adulthood. As a small child, I lacked language because trauma had silenced me. As a recovering adult, I lacked language because my inner transformation had outrun the vocabulary available to me. In both cases, there was a vast reality inside me and no sufficient means to communicate it.
So began the next great labor of my life.
Thirty Years of Rebuilding a Voice
Reconstruction did not happen quickly. It took decades.
For thirty sober years, I worked to develop a language adequate to my own life. I was not merely trying to tell a personal story. I was trying to understand how the wounds inside one human being connect to the deformations of the wider world. I wanted words for my trauma, yes, but also for the civilization that had shaped it and mirrored it.
By the time I reached sixty-one, the necessary vocabulary had finally begun to crystallize. I could speak not only about my own transformation, but about the deeper pathologies of the culture around me: toxic masculinity, spiritual emptiness, emotional repression, domination masquerading as order, and systems—medical, religious, economic, and political—that fail to meet the most basic human need of all, which is to be seen and heard as fully human.
My writing emerged from that realization.
It did not come from literary ambition. I did not set out to become “a writer” in any conventional sense. I began writing because I could no longer bear the cost of not writing. The page became a place where I could reclaim what had been taken from me in the garage: the right to utter my own reality without interruption, ridicule, or erasure.
How I Became a Writer
A pivotal moment came in November 2016.
My wife and I invited Sheila Hamilton to our house for a book club meeting to discuss her memoir All the Things We Never Knew. Sheila, a distinguished journalist and mental health advocate, wrote about her late husband’s bipolar disorder and his suicide. As I listened to her speak, I felt a shock of recognition. Much of what her husband had experienced—trauma, inner fragmentation, spiritual distress—I understood at a depth that was not theoretical.
I left that evening with a conviction: I needed to bring my own perspective into the world.
I was not a writer, but I began to write anyway.
I started a blog. I posted on Facebook. I wrote about trauma, toxic masculinity, toxic religion, toxic capitalism, and the spiritual diseases that grow inside cultures organized around domination and denial. My work was usually ignored. Some people stopped responding. A few unfriended me or turned off notifications. Indifference became my familiar companion again.
Still, one person did begin listening: my friend Marty.
Marty and the Mirror of Unspoken Life
Marty (left) and me, 1998
Marty had been part of our extended social world for over twenty years. We shared a couples’ group, trips, dinners, hikes, entertainment, and eventually book club meetings. We were friendly, but not deeply intimate. Like many male friendships, ours existed comfortably on the surface for a long time.
But after I began posting my writing, Marty showed real interest. A new kind of conversation opened between us.
I had long observed that Marty, especially in the presence of his wife, often deferred into silence. She organized much of their life and frequently spoke over him or for him. He became, in those moments, a man edited by the social arrangement around him. I recognized something in that. He, too, seemed to live in a world where expression struggled to find room.
What struck me was not simply the dynamics of one marriage, but the broader human pattern it reflected. Many people live half-muted lives. They adapt to relationships and social structures that do not truly welcome their interiority. They become listeners by compulsion rather than by choice. Their gifts remain buried not because they do not exist, but because the surrounding conditions do not make revelation safe.
Marty and I began, quietly, to share from that deeper place.
Seizures, Death, and a Dark Presence
In January 2017, a series of events began that intensified everything.
On January 11, I awoke in the early morning, went into my office, and suddenly lost the ability to move or think, though I remained aware. The episode lasted about a minute. During it, I became conscious of what I can only describe as a black mass in the left area of my inner field of bodily awareness. I had not experienced anything like that since 1987, when I had first sensed what I understood as my life-energy field.
I was alarmed, but I kept the experience mostly to myself. Then, in February, I had another, milder seizure in public while playing cards with friends. I began to believe that whatever I was sensing inwardly was real, and not merely imagined. I came to understand that dark mass spiritually, if not medically, as a form of death making itself known to me.
Prayer did not remove it. Meditation did not remove it. Talking did not remove it. It remained.
Then, on March 5, 2017, Marty suffered a major seizure and was hospitalized. He had already spent years recovering from malignant melanoma. Now a brain tumor had been discovered.
My wife and I visited him before surgery. Marty and I spoke about our seizures, and I was struck by how similar aspects of our experiences felt, though his were far more severe. I sensed some deep relationship between our suffering, but I did not yet know how to speak about it.
The next day, I had another episode of such intensity that I could barely function. I became dizzy, anxious, physically weakened, and increasingly unable to speak. Words took enormous effort. I felt as if my consciousness itself were trying to escape my body. I was not only frightened; I felt spiritually cornered.
That week, I hovered between breakdown and revelation.
The Moment Everything Changed
One evening, lying on the couch in anguish, I cried out to my wife Sharon. I told her that my life’s message was building inside me, but I did not believe I could deliver it in a way others would hear or understand. Sharon had written a beautiful and wonderful book in 2012 called
Whose Death is it Anyway? A Hospice Nurse Remembers
I knew Sharon could deliver a heart=felt truth. I begged her to speak it for me.
Sharon refused.
She did not refuse from coldness, but from love. She had listened to my story for nearly thirty years. She had witnessed how often I sat on my own voice. And now she told me plainly that my message was mine to deliver. If it did not come through me, it would not carry the fullness of my being.
That refusal was a turning point in my life.
I realized in that moment that no one could rescue me from self-expression. No loving surrogate could do my speaking for me. If I remained silent, I would be repeating the original trauma yet again. I would be returning myself to the garage.
So I prayed. A phrase from an old prayer rose within me:
“Grandfather, Great Spirit, thank you.”
Then something opened.
I felt compelled to write, and I did not stop until fifteen pages had poured out of me. It came as a parable. It arrived quickly, urgently, as though it had long been waiting behind a dam. In less than two days, I had written the first real story of my life.
That was how I became a writer.
Writing as Spiritual Necessity
From that point forward, writing was no longer optional. It became the central practice by which I stabilized, clarified, and reclaimed myself.
I wrote not because the culture was eager to receive what I had to say, but because I could no longer betray my own interior truth. Writing became a form of internal recalibration. Every sentence helped reorganize the fragmented pieces of my history. Every paragraph opposed the ancient lie that my voice was a burden.
At times, the process felt almost biological. If I did not write, pressure built within me. If I did write, something settled. The page became not merely a medium of communication, but a site of healing. It allowed me to witness myself, and in witnessing myself, to become more whole.
That matters because oppression creates fragmentation. Whether the oppression comes from family, school, culture, religion, economics, or gender expectations, its effect is similar: it teaches a person to split off essential parts of the self in order to survive. The long work of healing is therefore a work of reunification. For me, writing became one of the chief instruments of that reunification.
The Unread Writer
Yet a difficult irony remained. After fighting for decades to develop a meaningful voice, I still found myself speaking into a world that largely did not care to listen.
That fact has been painful. I would be dishonest if I pretended otherwise. The parallels to childhood are obvious enough that I cannot miss them. The non-listening masses often feel to me like an enlarged version of the exhausted father who needed my silence in order to sleep. Society itself appears spiritually fatigued. It prefers distraction to introspection, noise to truth, and comfortable narratives to deep disturbance.
At my worst moments, it feels as though the culture would still prefer to wrap me in a blanket and place me back in the dark garage so that it may continue sleeping undisturbed.
This is where my present spiritual work lies. I must continually resist projecting all of my early abandonment onto the indifference of the world. The silence around me is not always a personal rejection. Often it is a symptom of a civilization that has lost the capacity to listen deeply—to others, to itself, to Spirit, to pain, to conscience.
Still, that understanding does not erase the hurt. It only helps me bear it without collapsing into the old story.
I have sometimes thought of myself as one of the least-read writers in America. There is humor in that, but also truth. Much of what I have written has disappeared into near-total obscurity. Yet even that obscurity has taught me something essential.
It has taught me that expression and recognition are not the same thing.
Why continue, then?
Why write if so few people read? Why labor over ideas, memories, and truths that may never land in the wider culture?
Because writing is the antidote to my silencing.
I write because I need to exist in my own hearing. I write because the child in the garage deserves proof that he survived. I write because language allows me to transform mute suffering into living consciousness. I write because every honest sentence becomes an act of spiritual defiance.
There is also another reason. Oppression creates debt. The wounds inflicted by family and civilization do not end with private suffering; they ripple outward. To speak from the depth of one’s healing is, in some small way, to repay a sacred obligation. The truths I uncover in isolation may serve as lanterns for others still wandering through their own darkness. Even if only one person ever stumbles across my words and feels less alone, something meaningful has passed from my life into the world.
But even if no one does, the act still matters.
That has been one of the great revelations of my later life: the miracle is not that the world finally listens. The miracle is that I no longer require its permission in order to speak.
The Freedom of Self-Witness
The deepest healing did not arrive when I found an audience. It arrived when I severed the link between my self-worth and other people’s response.
That severing did not happen all at once. It came gradually, through decades of recovery, introspection, writing, and repeated disappointment. But eventually I understood something liberating: my voice matters because it is mine. My story matters because I survived long enough to tell it. My words do not need applause in order to be real.
In a culture obsessed with visibility, virality, and approval, this has felt like a radical lesson.
I began to write without first asking whether anyone would publish it. I wrote without calculating readership. I wrote to hear my own voice clearly in the quiet. I wrote to establish a relationship with myself that no external authority could mediate.
That inner visibility changed everything.
For most of my life, I had been trying to overcome the old terror that expression would lead to abandonment. What I know now is that the greater danger was abandoning myself. Every time I silenced my own truth in advance, I recreated the original wound. Every time I wrote honestly, regardless of reception, I repaired a piece of it.
Can You Hear Me Now?
So here I stand in the later years of life, in a place that resembles the beginning. Once again, I speak into a silence I do not control. Once again, I live with the ache of being insufficiently heard. Once again, I face the temptation to interpret the world’s indifference as evidence that my voice does not matter.
But I know better now.
I know that the garage was real, but it was not the final word. I know that addiction was devastating, but it was not the final word. I know that misunderstanding, obscurity, and cultural indifference are painful, but they are not the final word either.
The final word, if there is one, belongs to the act of creation itself.
I became a writer not because the world invited me to become one, but because my soul required it. I write because silence nearly erased me. I write because language helped return me to myself. I write because healing is not the same as being celebrated. Sometimes healing is simply the courage to keep telling the truth in an empty room.
There are remarkable parallels between the first years of my life and the last. In both, I am confronted by silence. In both, I am asked whether I will disappear inside it. In both, the essential question remains the same.
Can you hear me now?
More importantly:
Can I hear myself now?
At last, the answer is yes.
