Unheard

A notification pops up on my phone, telling me I have reached my one-hour limit on Instagram. I close the app, almost absent-mindedly, my thumb still hovering where the screen was moving just seconds ago. As the screen goes still, my brain is flooded with thoughts.

There are so many ways to speak now.

You can write, and the internet will read you.

You can record, and the world will watch you.

You can post, and your thoughts can travel faster than you ever will.

And yet, the more we speak, the more unheard we seem to feel. Somewhere between the scrolling and the swiping, all voices begin to blur. They become noise; a soft, endless hum we learn to tune out. And in doing so, we also learn, slowly, almost unknowingly, to tune out our own.

The platforms that promised a voice became silencers.

I often feel an intense need to share what goes on inside me. I am a deep thinker; my mind is rarely quiet, and my thoughts collect like unsent letters, waiting for the right place, moment and listener. But when it comes time to release them, I falter. My fingers don’t always know how to translate the depth, so my art falls short of what I feel. And language? It betrays me the most.

Being multilingual has somehow left me word-poor. My sentences arrive tangled, half Hindi, half Gujarati, woven together with English. They search for a place where they can rest, where they can be understood without explanation, where they can be loved without translation.

And in feeling unheard, I begin to notice something more uncomfortable. It is how often I fail to listen. How I miss the small confessions hidden in casual sentences, the tiredness behind a familiar smile, the pause in someone’s voice that is asking to be noticed. Sometimes, I listen only to respond, not to understand. My response arrives with smothering guilt.

Because isn’t this what we are all seeking, beneath everything else? The simple comfort of being seen, the unbound pleasure of being understood, of knowing that somewhere, someone is truly listening.

Perhaps the quietest tragedy of our time is not that we cannot speak, but that in a world overflowing with sound, we are slowly forgetting how to listen. To others, and to ourselves.