It’s not a nice feeling.

Being ignored.

It happens when we are at our most vulnerable.

The use of the void — to disarm, to destabilize, to re-establish control — is a deeply human trick.

Over time, that instinct evolved beyond personal wounds.

Silence became a weapon scaled for institutions, for systems, for the very architecture of public life.

Censorship, misdirection, omission — they are not anomalies.

They are techniques.

This week, I went looking for the structure inside silence.

And while living through my own small fractures,

I think I found something worth sharing.

I hope it gives you something too.

It wasn’t an easy one to live.

Architecture of Absence

When you grow up between families, between languages, between cultures,

you start to hear something others miss.

You feel the shifts inside language.

The places where meaning stretches, buckles, disappears.

You start to notice what is not said.

The world is rarely what it seems.

The veil is thin.

If you learn how to listen for the absences, not the noise,

the entire structure begins to shift under your feet.

We are trained to believe that falsehoods lie in conflict.

Problems laid out for us to solve.

Clear villains. Clear fights.

But the real distortions are quieter.

They live in the framing itself.

In the omissions.

In the untouched spaces.

If you want to understand where reality fractures,

if you want to hear the fault lines before they open,

you must learn to notice what was never spoken at all.

I learned this early.

First through the slow erosion of friendships.

The phone that stopped ringing without announcement.

The invitations that disappeared without confrontation.

When I moved back to London after Miami,

after years of building a life under borrowed names and inside borrowed spaces,

I knew I would have to create something sustainable.

Something visible.

Anonymity is a sport for the rich or the safely loved.

I was neither.

So I reached back into the old world.

A friend, about to be married, invited me to his bachelor party.

It felt like a chance to reconnect.

I arrived early, not sure who would still remember me.

The group I had once belonged to arrived together.

Men I had fought beside, stayed with, grown with.

They had all just been at another friend’s wedding the day before.

The strange thing was not that I had not been invited.

Others had not been invited either.

It was that the wedding itself was never mentioned.

Especially not by the groom.

As if refusing to name the event could erase the wound it might cause.

As if silence could soften the divide it revealed.

The instinct to conceal is ancient.

We use silence to protect.

We use it to spare.

We use it to misdirect.

We use it to survive.

But if you learn to listen carefully,

you will see that silence often reveals more than speech ever could.

Where people create silence, they reveal their vulnerability.

Where institutions create silence, they reveal their strategy.

Where cultures create silence, they reveal their fracture lines.

This is where real power begins.

Not in the noise.

Not in the obvious.

It begins upstream,

in the absences that shape the current long before you even knew there were questions to ask.

Today, we begin there.

We learn to listen not for what is said,

but for what was never meant for us to hear.

Silence as a Weapon

There is a brutality in early love that nobody warns you about.

The way silence moves through it like an invisible blade.

Like all things in nature, we are clumsy when young.

A baby snake bites and uses all of its venom at once,

not because it chooses to,

but because it does not yet understand restraint.

So it is with power.

We swing it without knowing what we do.

I remember the feeling of writing my first love letters,

after days and weeks of constant texting.

And then: nothing.

Silence like a door shut quietly in your face.

Or the sting of showing too much excitement too soon,

offering too much, texting too much,

only to be met with absence so complete it carved a hollow space inside my chest.

At first, you do not notice the pain.

There is still too much momentum, too much belief.

You stumble into the vacuum, arms out, heart racing, gut sinking,

still convinced it can be repaired if you just reach a little further.

It is only when the silence holds —

when no hand reaches back —

that the self-interrogation begins.

The slow collapse inward.

Men and women of all ages learn this game.

Silence and distance are not just accidents of busyness.

They are tactics.

They signal disinterest.

They signal scarcity.

They signal the presence of other priorities.

Not always with cruelty,

but always with consequence.

The modern world codifies it into rules:

Do not text three times in a row.

Wait thirty minutes to reply.

Act detached.

Stay unbothered.

Every Google search on dating maps out the same battlefield.

Silence is used to create a vacuum,

and into that vacuum, power moves.

It is a trap baited with absence.

The one who rushes to fill the silence, loses.

The same way a boxer creates distance to bait a lunge,

human beings create emotional gaps to destabilize.

We pull away not always to leave,

but to watch if someone will stumble forward.

But silence is not just a game of space.

It is a crafted signal, even if unconsciously.

And there is a way to tell the difference.

Authentic silence drifts.

It moves evenly, with a natural, unforced rhythm.

Manipulative silence snaps.

It shuts doors sharply.

It creates unnatural edges.

Once you feel that edge enough times,

you learn to recognize it.

You begin to understand that some people use silence,

not because they are absent,

but because they are shaping the field.

And once you know that,

the trap loses its grip.

Real relationships are built not in constant motion,

but in the ability to hold silence without losing connection.

To resist the panic of the void.

To trust the thread even when it stretches thin.

Later, working in the military,

living among families whose language I could not speak,

I learned a deeper layer.

I learned that omissions are fingerprints.

Half-told stories.

Missing names.

Sudden changes in pace.

When someone forgets to mention a detail,

when a gender disappears from a story,

when the timing no longer fits —

it leaves a scar you can read.

Authenticity has gentle curves.

Sharpness always reveals fear.

And every human being carries fracture lines.

If you listen carefully enough,

silence will show you exactly where they are.

The Pyramid of Silent Power

The first time I saw silence used systematically,

it was not inside a friendship group,

or even a professional relationship.

It was at the United Nations.

An organization built from every fracture line the world could provide.

Cultures stacked on top of cultures, politics tangled in politics.

Where, if you watched closely enough,

you could see silence stitched into the very walls.

Unlike in British institutions, where most tensions circle around gender, emotion, or decorum,

here the fractures were darker.

In some posts, sexual assault was systemic.

In others, espionage was part of the furniture.

But the most interesting places in our are of operations were simply marked:

Do not enter.

No explanation. No rationale. Just absence.

As if stepping too close to these areas would be enough to pull you under.

I have never been good at following instructions.

Still am not.

Silence pulls curiosity the way gravity pulls a tide.

Eventually, I pulled enough plausible deniability around me

and crossed the boundary.

What we found was not chaos.

It was structured.

Civil.

Ordered.

And it taught me something simple but unshakable:

Sometimes, silence is not there to protect you from danger.

It is there to protect the system from your questions.

From that moment on, it became impossible not to see the pattern.

Silence operates on every level of human life:

Individually.

Collectively.

Semantically.

And the higher you move up the structure,

The more reality itself starts to bend.

Reading the Pyramid

At the bottom, you find personal silencing:

the slow fades, the ghosting, the passive-aggressive punishments that hollow out relationships without direct confrontation.

In the middle, you find group-level silencing:

the building of social norms, the invisible fences, the collective shaming systems designed to keep dissent safely fenced off.

At the top, you find semantic warfare:

the control of words themselves.

The quiet bending of what reality is even allowed to mean.

This is where the real work is done.

Yes, it hurts when someone stops texting back.

Yes, it bruises when a group cancels and casts out.

But those wounds are visible.

They leave fingerprints.

What matters more is the wound you are never even allowed to notice:

The questions that were erased before they could form.

The words that never made it into your vocabulary.

At the top of the pyramid, reality is not fought for.

It is written.

And if you cannot name a thing, you cannot think it.

Baudrillard once said:

Reality, seen from here, is not truth.

It is curation.

In the medieval world, mapmakers filled in unknown territories with dragons and sea monsters —

not because they had found them,

but because it was better to scare people away

than admit they did not know.

Modern silence works the same way.

We do not see the dragons now.

We just stop hearing the words.

We stop seeing the gaps.

Artists like Banu Cennetoğlu built entire bodies of work out of these gaps —

installations erased mid-exhibition,

reminding everyone that what you see depends on what you are allowed to see.

Sophie Calle turned the absence itself into narrative.

The gaps are not accidents.

They are messages.

Silence is engineered.

When I think about the real value of a word,

I think about pharmaceutical marketing.

The way drug names are crafted to slip under emotional radars,

the way disorders are mapped not only against suffering,

but against projected market cap.

It is not a conspiracy.

It is basic business:

If a new diagnosis can create a billion-dollar opportunity,

then a $50 million marketing spend is a rounding error.

Language is not just communication anymore.

It is capital.

And so, semantic warfare blooms:

If your group speaks in optimism, your thinking rises.
If your group speaks in isolation, your trust collapses.

Vocabulary becomes a gravitational field.

It decides what clumps together —

and what tears itself apart.

It is not just about what is spoken.

It is about what is erased.

The collapse of words.

The disappearance of challenging thought.

The replacement of real questions with hollow slogans.

When a phrase disappears from circulation,

it is rarely because it became irrelevant.

It is often because it became dangerous.

COCA corpus studies show the data trails —

the absences engineered into public thought.

A technical archaeology of vanished realities.

Semantic warfare is not a new invention.

Every empire has known that the sword cannot work alone.

It needs the tongue to pave the way.

But now the field is total.

Every meme, every caption, every slogan you touch

is part of a wider theater of control.

I will never know the full map.

Neither will you.

But the important thing is to recognize that it is there.

And once you do,

you will stop tearing at the edges of your own life,

thinking you failed at something you were never meant to win.

The real work starts by noticing:

What words have disappeared?

What questions no one seems to ask?

What silences feel thicker than they should?

You are closer now.

You are almost ready to start seeing the structure for what it really is.

The Makers of Silence

Most people do not turn away from the truth because they are scared.

They turn away because they are tired.

Manufactured silence relies on that exhaustion.

Once you notice how silence is made, you realize it is not magic.

It is a craft.

It follows a simple loop:

1. Synchronization

When every outlet tells the same story the same way at the same time, it is not a coincidence.

It is choreography.

Example: Watch how scandals dissolve when a foreign dignitary needs clean optics.

It is not accidental. It is air traffic control.

2. Misdirection through Noise

Flood the airwaves. Drown the signal.

If something major happens and your feed fills with celebrity gossip and brand launches, you are watching a cover-up operate in real time.

3. Omission as Strategy

When something obvious disappears from headlines, that is not a mistake.

It is a transaction.

Example: The assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada.

No noise. No justice. No problem.

4. Lexical Framing

Words tilt reality before you even notice it moving.

Call someone a rebel, and they are a hero.

Call them an insurgent, and they are a threat.

Control the nouns, control the temperature of the room.

Silence is not just what happens between people.

It happens between entire realities.

It shapes history, not by lying about it, but by letting it rot quietly in the corners no one visits.

Narendra Modi understands this better than almost anyone alive.

Manufacturing religious loyalty, empowering the right voters, muting the wrong questions.

The largest elected dictatorship in the world, built not with violence, but with selective vision.

When Sikh activists began dying abroad, the media barely stirred.

Not because it was unimportant.

Because admitting it would fracture the illusion of safety.

Silence is cheaper than sovereignty.

Every country uses these tools.

Not because they are evil.

Because power defends itself with every resource available.

And the most effective defense is not a wall.

It is a vacuum.

You get rewarded for obedience.

You get rewarded for not looking too closely.

Stay obedient long enough, and you might never even realize you were standing inside a cage.

But silence is not just the absence of noise.

It is an active architecture.

A system of permissions and deletions that quietly tilts your entire view without you ever feeling the angle change.

Control the language.

Control the gravity.

A rebel is romantic.

An insurgent is dangerous.

A partner is safe.

A girlfriend is a risk.

Tiny words. Massive shifts.

Jenny Holzer once said:

“Protect me from what I want.”

Language protects you from seeing how badly you want something real.

Until it fails.

And then you start to see where the surface cracks

Detection

Sensitivity is a strange thing.

Most days, I move through the world hood up, hat on, sunglasses over my eyes, noise-cancelling headphones in — no music playing.

It might look like sensory deprivation.

But really, it is defense.

Normal existence is a little too loud for me.

Lights for too long still leave me with headaches.

Crowded rooms tilt me off balance.

Even soft conversations can start to feel like static after a while.

That’s the downside of sensitivity.

But tuned properly, sensitivity becomes something else.

Not a weakness — but a weapon.

It lets you hear the things that aren’t said.

It lets you notice the fingerprints that silence leaves behind.

And if you follow those fingerprints backward, you start finding the architects.

Every silence, every omission, every sudden absence —

it all points back to someone protecting something.

If you know how to follow the gaps,

you can figure out who is protecting what.

And once you can see that, you start to understand why they move the way they do.

It is not complicated.

It is just rarely taught.

Because systems rely on most people never learning how to see the gaps at all.

The Tools of Detection

1. Track Emotional Absences

Sometimes, the emotion does not fit the scene.

There should be celebration, but you feel tension.

There should be anger, but you sense practiced politeness.

When you catch those mismatches —

that is your sign.

That is where the silence is hiding something.

It is easy to get pulled into these emotional fields.

It is harder — and better — to treat them like fractures in a wall.

They show you where to be careful.

They show you where care might be needed.

And sometimes they show you there is no care for you at all.

2. Trace Semantic Evasions

When someone dodges a question,

when a conversation shifts too quickly,

when humor suddenly floods a difficult space —

watch it.

Semantic evasion is a classic move.

Not necessarily because people are malicious.

Sometimes because they simply cannot bear to speak it out loud.

But the shift itself leaves a trail.

Follow the shift, not the noise it creates.

3. Map Organizational Blackouts

Organizations leave absences too.

Scandals that vanish overnight.

Stories that slide off the front page without warning.

Questions that never get answered.

The trick is not just looking for what is loud.

It is noticing what is missing.

The gaps are not random.

They are blueprints of who is holding what power — and who is protecting whom.

4. Follow the Money and Energy

Follow the spend.

Or the absence of spend.

If something matters, it will have energy allocated to it: money, time, visibility.

If it does not, it will be allowed to rot quietly.

The areas no one funds often tell you just as much as the ones everyone fights over.

Silence, just like noise, costs energy to maintain.

Why Detection Matters

Humans learned how to lie a long time ago.

Not because they are evil.

Because they are vulnerable.

And vulnerability — our differences, our needs — makes lying sometimes feel necessary.

It will break your heart, over and over, to realize this.

People will lie to you.

Organizations will lie to you.

You will lie to yourself.

It is the cost of being human.

But if there is anything that matters in how we learn to live alongside that,

it is the ability to notice the silences without hardening against them.

Because not every silence is a weapon.

Some silences are symptoms.

Some silences are survival.

Triage

When things really go wrong —

when there is blood, wreckage, real stakes —

the first step is not panic.

It is triage.

Figure out who is actually hurt.

Figure out who is quiet because they cannot call for help.

It is rarely the loud ones who need you most.

It is the unconscious.

It is the ones whose wounds are too deep to name.

Silence is not just a tactic of the powerful.

It is the cloak of the broken.

And if you learn to listen properly,

you can start to tell the difference between a trap and a call for help.

Silence, omission, evasion —

they are all made of the same material.

But the context changes everything.

When power silences,

it protects itself.

When vulnerability silences,

it asks for protection.

The real skill is not just noticing the silence.

It is knowing what to do with it.

Because once you see it clearly,

you have a choice:

Use what you know to strengthen yourself at the cost of others.

Or use what you know to protect the ones who cannot call out.

Either way, you are no longer innocent.

You are part of the structure now.

And if we want to make this system stronger —

less brutal, less broken —

It will take all of us learning how to move differently.

The Garden of Silence

We are often taught to perceive the world as a place shaped by towering powers —

forces manipulating us from behind mirrored glass.

And yes, some of that is true.

But the deeper truth is simpler.

The tools used to shape the world around you

are the same ones we all learned in the playground.

Silence.

Omission.

Misdirection.

Distance.

The only real difference is leverage.

A bigger screwdriver.

A larger reach.

And when you see that —

when you understand that the people shaping reality are still just people,

insecure and improvising,

the monster shrinks.

They are playing the same emotional games you once played at twelve years old —

only now, the board is bigger.

And the cost of losing is higher.

I think about the world as a garden.

Not a battlefield.

Not a prison.

A garden.

We are trees and flowers in this space.

We grow slowly.

We survive by tending the small, real things.

Sunlight.

Water.

Trust.

You cannot force a garden to bloom by running from tree to tree, shouting at them to grow faster.

You tend the soil.

You clear the rot.

You protect the roots.

And if you do that —

quietly, consistently —

the garden will outlive you.

This is what seeing silence teaches you.

Not how to fight.

Not how to dominate.

But how to notice where life is trying — and failing — to bloom.

And what it might take to protect it.

Silence and omission are easy tools to use.

Hold space long enough, and someone will reveal themselves.

Push misdirection hard enough, and someone will follow the wrong trail.

You can become very good at this if you want to.

But there are costs.

The costs are vulnerability.

The costs are freedom.

Because every manipulation you create

becomes another system you must maintain.

Another lie you must remember.

Another distance you must manage.

And the work never stops.

So when you notice omission in a relationship,

when you feel a silence thicken where words should be,

yes — it tells you something is being hidden.

But it also tells you something about the person doing the hiding.

They are afraid.

They are insecure.

They are trying to protect something inside themselves they do not trust you to see.

And if you are strong enough — really strong —

you can choose what to do with that knowledge.

You can create more space for them.

You can hold the silence without forcing it to break.

You can let them walk toward you at their own pace.

You do not have to eat them in the trap.

You do not have to punish them for being fragile.

Because maybe — just maybe —

the real test of strength is not wielding silence against others.

It is holding the space where love can survive even when it hurts.

Being seen is terrifying.

Revealing ourselves is brutal.

We cover ourselves in layers for a reason.

If it were easy, therapists would be out of work.

But knowing where you hide —

and where others are hiding —

gives you the chance to meet each other somewhere truer.

Somewhere closer.

Not perfectly.

Not always cleanly.

But more real.

I always struggle when I write these newsletters.

Because the last thing I want is for you to walk away thinking:

“I need to go fix something now.”

You don’t.

You are not broken.

There is nothing to fix.

All I can offer you is a new set of lenses.

If you put them on,

you might notice that the rivers you are swimming in
were redirected long before you stepped into them.

You might notice where omissions guide your life more than intentions.

You might notice where silence grows gardens.

And where it builds prisons.

You do not have to rush out and change anything.

You do not have to fight reality.

You simply have to choose:

Which relationships do you want to water?

Which truths do you want to protect?

Which garden do you want to tend?

Hope you have the most amazing week.

I love you loads.

Russ.

Poets Corner

Of Talking

Each Sunday I sit with the poet,
And going about our weekly chat
He tells me - on the subject of talking -
That he’s decided to stop altogether.
‘Enough is enough of the talking,
enough is enough and that
- of the talking - is that.’

He tells me he’s tired of the talking,
The useless rattle of the tittle tattle,
The constant chirping of birds
But not as beautiful,
Just complaining and clunky.
‘That scandal is so scandalous,
the rail system is such a mess.’

He tells me that now
He’ll talk with the sound,
The sound in the silence of spaces.
‘Because this is the talk
Where the most talk gets said,
Because this is the talk
That will talk through the ages.’

Each Sunday I sit with the poet,
Not wasting a word I slam him shut,
I throw him onto the pile of the books,
That gather on the desk
Like speckles of dust.
‘Of talking - that is that -
of talking - that is enough.’

- Thomas May