At the beginning of the year, I made my vision board and added the word “Silencio!” between pictures of my family, idyllic images of a vacation on a lake, and reminders to pray more than I worry. Silence is the anthem of an introvert like myself, and the distant cousin to loneliness and solitude. It will reveal the patterns in life we often overlook: the rattling of our voice in our throat early in the morning, the loudness of the creaking floorboard you grew to ignore, and the intensity of your racing thoughts, barreling through your mind without regard for any semblance of traffic laws. Silence is what I was chasing going into my last semester of law school because, for the past three years, everything was delivered to me over a loudspeaker.
My entering class of law students was one of the most competitive in recent years due to our obsession with overachieving. This culminated into high LSAT statistics, impressive resumes and letters of recommendation. I’ve always lived with the pressure to excel, but copying and pasting that mentality into the blank canvas of law school disrupted my tried-and-true formula for success that had rendered “good” grades in college. Here, my grades were based solely, and most importantly, on one final exam that covered an entire textbook of subtopics. My brain was forced to sift through hypotheticals and piece together an answer that relied on legal theory, case law, and a healthy dose of luck. Through the tiresome cycle of studying for exams over the past three years, I found myself speaking more than I anticipated. I spoke to professor candidates who were interviewing to be part of my school’s faculty and asked them what drove them to apply, hoping to understand what would make them stay. I delivered my poetry at my school’s open mic performance, finally letting out pent-up energy that isn’t appropriate for a law school exam. I found myself at dinner tables and professors’ offices decorated with family photos, talking about the collective disappointment at my school’s lack of responsiveness to racism and other inequities on campus.
When the incidents at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023, took place, there was a strange wrestling match on campus. Students were scared into silence to speak on their views, while others were emboldened to a dangerous level of callousness in affirming their beliefs on who was right in a misunderstood global disruption of humanity. Everything was on the line for those on one side of the discord while everything stood to be gained by the other side. The fear of losing your job, of being labeled antisemitic, of having a hailstorm of hate rain down on you stunned so many of us—and still does—into keeping our conversations constrained to hushed tones in the hallways or, even worse, not breathing life into those beliefs and taking a stand at all.
Now, almost a year later, Kamala Harris is making history with the potential of becoming this nation’s first Black and South Asian female president. Yet, the same wrestling is happening. It is unnerving to see a cycle unfold, to see us repeat history without learning from it and changing its course. This cycle is one where the people of this country demand that Mrs. Harris take a stand against the destruction and violence in Gaza, that she support the constituents who look like her, and that she be the patron saint of change, reform and equity. There are dreams bound up in demands that are held over her head because we know the peril we will face should her opponent win this presidential election. She is the first of her kind to reach this close to the sky, and we are praying that she does not reach the same fate as Icarus. But we’ve made this call to the heavens before.
When any Black person is killed at the hands of police, when there is discrimination in the workplace, when Project 2025 exists, when a presidential candidate’s entire platform is built on the same history and hateful rhetoric that built America, so many of us have taken to the streets to make our voices heard. But what scares me is that even when we are screaming in the streets, there is no change and if there is, it is marginal and insignificant. Now with this upcoming election, I wonder if the powers that be will do the right thing and finally draw a line in the sand against global and domestic injustices and systems that have plagued every hopeful generation.
I believe the need for silence called me from a place of exhaustion. In her book Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey obliterates the notion that rest is a reward after grinding ourselves to the ground. Instead, rest must be inherent in our lives to rebuild ourselves and function in a world of responsibilities, doubt, violence, and oppression. Rest is intrinsic to our collective survival and yet has stifled the survival of so many.
There is an undeniable pressure, now more than ever, to resist the silence and speak up. I struggle to imagine the bravery our ancestors had when they risked their homes, jobs, comfort, and lives to stand up for equity in wages, race, and gender. They took their concerns to the legislature, to the streets, to the lunch counters. They could not wallow in silence because they knew that silence would kill them and their children. Silence would rob their children of the possibility of living in their parents’ dreams of a world that accepts them and respects them for who they are.
Now, after graduating from law school, I am the first lawyer my family has known. An inherent part of the job description is to use my words to make an impact, to solve my client’s problems and to be a changemaker. Yet, I feel a tension between using my voice and quieting it. I am hyper-aware of the space I take up, and as a woman, there is the unconscious effort to minimize myself at times. I have prepared myself to adhere to artificial levels of hierarchy and office bureaucracy, anticipating moments when I will deeply disagree with the decisions made around me. I anticipate the expectations put on me by this new chapter of my life, and they unnerve me for their newness and unpredictability. But I also know it would be a disservice to myself and to the community that’s built me up to do anything but step out and use my voice—there is a thin line between silence as complacency and contemplation. In a time when everyone owns a mic and a phone to record their thoughts, there is so much that seems to be discussed, but in truth, there is nothing of substance to chew on—much like the Wizard of Oz simply being a man behind a curtain instead of a larger than life being.
We have talked ourselves into believing that the more we put online, the more thought-provoking and advanced we’ve become, and while that may be true to some degree, there is still a chasm where depth should live in our conversations. Our dreams of change and progress must be manifested in the work of our hands in classrooms as teachers, mentors, elected officials, parents and loved ones. Dreams are not copyrightable—they need to be manifested into something tangible to be protected. We have to speak life into the future we want.
I’ve realized there must be a balance between the silence that gives me peace and using my voice to disrupt. As I enter this new phase of my life, obstacles will inevitably arise, but if I am to learn from those who were outspoken in my past, in our collective ancestral past, I know there is a path forward to create the change I hope to see.
