Written piece
The Quiet Fire: Growing Up Between Silence and Survival
Nuhu Yazeed
Nigeria
About this piece
Place where i come from ,Awareness means ISKANCI (a spoilt person).
And the whole society turn on you , just for breaking generational ,traditional ,religious ,and societal gates. And choosing to question but you don’t believe or understand. So i chose to deep-think.
There is a place I come from where silence is not empty.
It is full.
Full of rules that are never written down but always obeyed.
Full of expectations you learn before you learn your own voice.
Full of eyes that observe you before you understand yourself.
In my part of Nigeria, jos to be precise,a child does not grow up only inside a home. He grows up inside a community that watches, interprets, and concludes, just like in a cage.
And if you are not careful, you begin to live according to the conclusions of others.
I grew up in a home where survival was never in question.
There was food.
There was shelter.
There was structure.
My father made sure of that.
But what was less present was what I only later learned to name parental love. Its almost killed me. Nut i survived. A survivor. Dads conversations. Hmmm!
He was not a man of many words. He was a man of responsibility. His life moved between work and return, between departure and arrival. And in those movements, I learned something early: love can exist without speech, but it does not always feel like closeness.
As a child, I did not understand that difference.
I only felt the silence.
Children do not always respond to silence with questions.they hmmmm! And i hmmmed for so long.
Sometimes they respond with observation.
So I observed everything.
The way people spoke when they were pretending to be fine.
The way respect changed depending on who was present.
The way stories grew legs and travelled faster than truth.
Slowly, I began to understand that perception was not just opinion.
It was power.
Outside the home, I was learning another lesson.
That being understood is not guaranteed.
A simple gesture could become a story.
A friendship could become suspicion.
A silence could become a label.
And once a label forms, it begins to replace the person it describes.
Inside all of this, I was still a child trying to understand my father.
His love was visible — in provision, in responsibility, in sacrifice. But it was rarely spoken.
And I began to realize something I could not articulate then:
We were both speaking love, but in different languages.
He spoke through duty.
I needed it through dialogue.
And between those two forms of expression, silence grew.
I often listened to him leave in the mornings.
The sound of movement, of responsibility beginning before the world fully wakes.
That sound stayed with me longer than most conversations.
Because it became a pattern.
Departure.
Silence.
Return.
Silence again.
And in that rhythm, I learned how to exist quietly inside my own thoughts.
But silence does not stay empty.
It fills itself.
With interpretation.
With imagination.
With misunderstanding.
And slowly, even my identity began to be shaped by voices outside me.
People built meanings around my actions that I never intended.
And I learned something painful but important:
You are not always seen as you are.
Sometimes you are seen as what others need you to be.
At some point, I stopped expecting explanation.
Not because I stopped caring.
But because I realized that some people do not listen to understand. They listen to confirm what they already believe.
So I turned inward.
Not into isolation, but into awareness.
I began thinking more deeply. Observing more carefully. Trying to understand not just people, but the reasons behind people.
And in that process, something shifted.
Silence stopped being only absence.
It became instruction.
It taught me patience.
It taught me attention.
It taught me how to see without being told what to see.
Even my father, I began to understand differently.
He was not a man withholding love.
He was a man expressing it in the only form he had learned: responsibility without explanation.
And that realization did not remove the distance between us.
But it changed how I carried it.
Because sometimes understanding does not erase pain.
It simply gives it meaning.
I am still learning what it means to speak in a world that often speaks first about you before speaking to you.
But I know this much:
Silence is not always emptiness.
Sometimes it is where awareness begins.
And once awareness begins, it does not remain quiet forever.the quiet fire begins burning. Little sparks, then fire .
Because even silence… learns to speak.
i learned to speak.
thank. I found writing, since the, i feel like the loudest.