Expression as Practice
Deep Read: On Audre Lorde, Shashi Deshpande, and learning to speak when silence is easier
Part 3 of the On Expression series
It happened again three weeks later.
We were at a coffee shop this time. Not a dinner party. Just a casual Saturday afternoon with people I’d known for years. The conversation was energetic, overlapping, everyone talking over each other in that way groups do when they’re comfortable. Laughter came in waves. The energy was high.
And I was... quiet.
Not withdrawn. Not sulking. Just present in my own stillness. Listening more than performing. Contributing when I had something to say, but not filling silence just to match the room’s tempo.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I wasn’t refusing anything specific. I was just being myself at my own pace.
But I felt it happen anyway. That shift. The way the group’s energy seemed to notice my lack of participation, my refusal to match its rhythm. The way someone glanced at me — not unkindly, but with a slight confusion. The way the conversation adjusted around me, as if my quietness was a problem to be solved.
Later, walking home, I caught myself thinking: I didn’t even say anything. And I still somehow killed the mood, apparently.
There was no harmful joke this time. No comment to refuse. No dignity being used as a punchline.
Just a group dynamic that expected me to match its energy. And my refusal — not even a refusal, just my inability — to perform that matching.
That was enough to make me the killjoy.
I’d just done this. Just three weeks ago. I’d sat through the discomfort, the social punishment, the quiet exclusion that followed. I’d become a killjoy once. And here I was, about to do it again.
But this time, something was different.
This time, I understood: this isn’t a one-time decision. This is a practice.
Expression isn’t something you do once and then you’re done. It’s not a heroic moment that transforms you forever. It’s a daily choice. A muscle you build. A habit you cultivate.
And if I was going to keep doing this — if I was going to keep refusing to let harm slide by unnamed — I needed to understand what I was actually building.
Not a persona. Not a performance.
A practice.
The Loop You Keep Running
Let me trace the pattern for you, because I’ve run it enough times now to see it clearly.
You swallow something. A comment. A boundary violation. A moment where someone’s dignity becomes the punchline. You swallow it because speaking feels dangerous. Because niceness feels safer than honesty. Because you’ve learned that your silence is the price of belonging.
This was Part 1 of this series. The nice girl script. The rage you’re not supposed to feel. The years of training yourself to make yourself smaller so everyone else can stay comfortable.
Then something shifts. You stop swallowing. You speak. You become a killjoy — the person Sara Ahmed describes as refusing to make oppression comfortable. You don’t laugh at the sexist joke. You name the racism everyone’s ignoring. You point out that the room’s ease is built on someone else’s erasure.
This was Part 2. The feminist killjoy. James Baldwin refusing to make white America comfortable with its history. The people who won’t let harm hide behind politeness.
And then comes the punishment. Not always loud. Often quiet. The invitations that stop coming. The label: “difficult,” “too much,” “no fun.” The suggestion that if you just relaxed, things would be easier for everyone.
Easier for everyone means: easier for the people who benefit from the harm going unnamed.
And here’s where the loop closes: you get punished for speaking, and the punishment makes you wonder if silence was safer after all.
Express once → get punished → tempted to silence again.
I kept running this loop. Express. Get punished. Wonder if I should have just stayed quiet.
Until I realized: the loop itself was the problem.
Because I was treating expression like an event. A single moment of courage. A one-time stand.
But expression isn’t an event. It’s a practice.
And one-time expression doesn’t change anything. It just interrupts the pattern temporarily.
Habitual expression — expression as daily practice, as muscle memory, as the default instead of the exception — that’s what transforms you.
