The Intrusion.

on psychic noise, creativity, and silence-as-luxury

May 02, 2025

In November of 2024, after our national elections, I went to my local Quaker meeting here in New England.

It seemed to be a natural response to the noise that was suddenly upon us again, and I was drawn to the silence like metal to magnet. I just wanted to sit in quiet communion with others because my brain, heart, and spirit were completely exhausted; they had collectively stopped taking in any new information because there was no room left for it. Those of us who were there at the meeting that morning were not rendered silent by any external force; instead, we actively sought silence as refuge against impending psychic noise of the sort that is so loud — so thunderously, roof-rattlingly blaring — that you actually can’t hear it. That kind of noise reminds me of the concerts I used to go to in the late 1970s, when I was sixteen. I remember seeing Yes — twice (no idea why; I never liked them) — in Madison Square Garden, and apart from recognizing Rick Wakeman’s very long blond hair as he sat in front of a stack of synthesizers, I could hear nothing; it was as though I was stuck inside a white noise machine with its volume turned all the way up. And that was how I felt in November of 2024 when the unthinkable happened, again, along with the shouting, the raging, the gas-lighting, the intentional out-of-controlness of it all. So I went to the Quakers, and there were forty people sitting around me that morning who felt exactly the same way I did. And that helped.

The human brain needs some level of silence and stillness to enable us to hear what it is calling us to create, whether we’re a writer or a painter or we’re baking a pie.

Some people tolerate noise well; I never have, and I believe it has to do with the environment in which I was raised. I know people who were brought up in quietly seething households, where the rage was silent, and no one knew where they stood at any given time. I was raised in the opposite, in a two-bedroom apartment in Queens with two parents who loathed each other and shouted at the top of their lungs every morning, for any particular reason, or none at all. When my grandmother came over — she lived across the street and had her own set of keys much to my father’s dismay — she let the heavy fireproof door slam shut behind her, which, even when she was in a good mood, made the doorbell ring spontaneously, which in turn made the dog bark. My grandmother was also a yeller, and I myself grew up a yeller, surrounded by a family of yellers who spent most of their time and energy yelling. Because that’s what yellers do. Yellers yell for one reason: to be louder than you, and to be heard over everyone.

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It was only when I went away to college that I realized this was not normal, and when I brought my close friends home to New York for the holidays (my mother was remarried and living in the city by then), they were often shocked by the manner in which my mother spoke to me, but also, her actual loudness. She had and has no volume control. All these years later, at 89 years old, once she starts, she can’t stop herself, like a runaway train. When I hear the change in her voice that portends a meltdown, I say goodbye and hang up the phone. When she calls back SO THAT SHE CAN SCREAM AT ME, I let it go to voicemail. It used to be that when she called back, I’d answer, and she’d shout DON’T YOU HANG UP ON ME, until I said to myself Wait a minute….what’s wrong with this picture….

I’ve been spending a lot of time living in this world of the shouters, this world of unrestrained noise, and, unless you live in a cave or a nunnery, so have you. It’s not quite the same thing, but I consider the constant barrage of social media the equivalent of nonstop shouting, and although I have no proof of this, I wouldn’t be surprised if the human brain responds to them the same way. Add to this the fact of trauma and histories of abuse that so many people live with — myself included — and we’re faced with the problem of triggers: the gaslighting that is so familiar and that is utilized daily, often against people who aren’t even aware that it’s happening while the rest of us squirm and sweat because it is so recognizable at the somatic level. For us, gaslighting is like an ancient vernacular that our great-grandparents once spoke: it lingers in our corpuscles, and, under the right conditions, we find ourselves easily speaking in their accents even though we haven’t heard them in fifty years.

Noise doesn’t always have to come from an overtly negative place: it can just be a bombardment of stimuli designed to make you pay attention to it, bad or good. We all have multiple screens and when the phone is vibrating because you’ve silenced the ringer, and the iPad is ringing because you forgot that it has a ringer, and the Apple watch is buzzing because it’s linked to the phone, and the television set is on, this will affect your brain, which will attempt to metabolize all of it at the same time (which is a little like squeezing the back end of an elephant through the eye of a needle). It’s the neurological equivalent of having too many tabs open or playing a game of whack-a-mole. In the 90s, I was told by a manager at work that I would be a success at what I did because I could juggle three things at once; this felt and feels like a very noisy problem, and I was rewarded for it with a raise.

If noise is preventing you from living a creative life or is in any way short-circuiting it, it will make you a slave to demand. It will turn you into an automaton. You will move through your days like a ball in a pinball machine.

In 2018, I attended Krista Tippett’s On Being Gathering in California: imagine a roomful of viscerally quiet people — writers, poets, clergy, peace-makers, Buddhist scholars and teachers, visual and musical artists — together for three days to talk about our work, faith, spirituality, and the state of the world. And I remember hearing Krista say this thing that really stuck: I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of it is that those who shout the loudest don’t always necessarily win. But we’re somehow programmed to believe they do. I liken it to that thing that happens when you’re in another country where you have no common language, you ask someone directions using hand gestures, they can’t understand you, and you can’t understand them, so you YELL BECAUSE THEN THEY WILL. (Insert eye-rolling emoji.)

Noise can be internal; noise can be external; noise can be emotional and existential. How does it impact creativity? Mightily. The creative brain often does need external stimuli, be it bad or good (meaning: Guernica emerged out of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, from spiritual transcendence after the composer began losing his hearing). But more than anything, the creative brain needs some level of silence and stillness to enable us to hear what it is calling us to do, whether we’re a writer or a painter or we’re baking a pie. When we give our creative agency away — freely hand it over — to shouters and yellers and bright and shiny objects who Hoover up our attention, we’re putting their creative work ahead of our own. Sometimes — during periods of dangerous political strife, or climate disaster, or social upheaval — this is necessary, but most times, it’s not, and we have to make that determination for ourselves. To be sure, our lives would be dimmer and far less beautiful without the work of others; we also have to know when to step away and why, and focus on our own.

As I wrote in Permission, we live in a world that swings on the hinge of disruption and distraction, like an annoying, creaking door. Finding silence in which to do one’s creative work — even to just think about doing it — has been made impossible by the pull of the noisy dopamine hit, the built-in addictive need to look at our phones, to check our email, to look at the pretty pictures on Instagram, to get stuck in the quicksand of the digi-guru who will change your life without even knowing who you are. And if noise is preventing you from living a creative life or in any way short-circuiting it, it will make you a slave to demand. It will turn you into an automaton. You will move through your days like a ball in a pinball machine.

In the world in which we live, with everything and everyone vying for our attention by BEING LOUDER, silence feels like a luxury, because it is. If it wasn’t, the idea of going on a silent retreat wouldn’t be so outlandish for so many; stepping back from the noise — or at least investigating it and what it is doing to the way you think about your creative life — would be the necessity I believe it is. In Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning from Silence, he writes that when he is on a silent retreat, he often feels closer to the people he cares for than when they’re in the same room. I suspect this is because with silence comes expansion, and space for the brain and heart to open amidst the clattering, squishing contraction of noise. This is why silence can also be so scary, so frightening, and why we actively seek to fill it, welcoming every intrusion that crosses our path.

In November of 2024, I found myself sitting in the silence of a Quaker meeting; the world had changed, the shouting and noise had gotten louder overnight, and I could feel my heart and spirit tightening up and shutting down. When it was over and I stepped out into the day, I breathed for the first time in what felt like days. Months later, in a world turned upside down, it’s silence I seek now more than ever as a way to allow my brain to rest. The noise we live with demands and feeds off my creative agency, and it demands yours, too.

Please: don’t give it away.

Note:

Please join me for a week-long writer’s workshop at the stunning Castle Hill/Truro Center for the Arts, from August 4th - August 8th, on Permission and Writing the Story You Must Tell. This will be my third season teaching at this beautiful, welcoming place, which is very close to the magical beaches of Truro and Wellfleet. For more information, go here.