Some Screams Are Never Heard

The Banshee Diaries — Entry One

There are screams no one hears.

Not because they are quiet. Because the world has trained itself to listen only when the noise becomes inconvenient.

A woman says she is tired, and someone offers advice she never asked for. She says she is angry, and someone asks her to calm down. She says she has been hurt, and suddenly she is on trial for the way she tells the story. People have remarkable hearing when they want entertainment. Less so when they might have to care.

I know something about being heard. I am a banshee. My voice is not merely a thing I carry into a room. It is a force I have to live with. A song can invite you closer. A cry can warn you away. And the fullest expression of what I am is dangerous even to me. That is the part of this pretty little nightmare people forget: power can be a gift and a risk in the same breath.

The difference between silence and peace

I used to wonder why people confuse silence with peace. A silent room may be full of secrets. A quiet person may be running through an entire argument inside their head. Sometimes what looks like restraint is just exhaustion wearing good manners.

There are days I choose softness. I like beauty, rhythm, laughter, and a melody that makes somebody stop scrolling for three minutes. I can be gentle without being harmless. Those are not the same thing.

And then there are days when the demands begin to pile up: the bills, the expectations, the people who swear they know exactly who you are, the strangers who treat a life like a comment section. Every little pressure asks for a piece. By evening, they have assembled a cage and called it responsibility.

I do not plan to make a home inside that cage.

Why I sing instead of scream

A song gives a feeling somewhere to go. It does not always solve the problem, and I would never insult you by promising that it does. But music can place an honest name on something you've been carrying in secret. It can make a person feel less alone for the length of a chorus. Sometimes that is enough to get through another night.

My voice lives on that narrow line between invitation and warning. I love the intimacy of singing to someone who cannot quite tell whether I am comforting them or calling them out. I love the moment the music gets loud enough for the truth to stop asking permission.

What I will not do is pretend every emotion needs to be made palatable. Anger is information. Grief is information. Desire, fear, embarrassment, relief—none of them becomes less real because somebody dislikes the sound.

A note for the unheard

If you have spent years swallowing your words so everyone around you can stay comfortable, I want you to know there is another possibility. You can speak clearly. You can choose your battles. You can walk away from arguments that survive only because you keep feeding them.

You do not have to become cruel to become impossible to control.

When I sing VUCHK, I am not asking you to hate the entire world. I am asking what would happen if you refused to let its noise become the only voice in your head.

So tell me: what have you been trying to say that nobody has wanted to hear?

I will be here. Listening. And, when the time comes, singing.

— IIAAW

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