The sun is shining brilliantly as I walk home. I share the street with gorgeous, leafy trees and passers-by. They seem to come from all walks of life: students, employees, parents, grand-parents, and the homeless. That last group is the most outspoken. Only yesterday I heard a speech about President Nixon--somebody was reliving their past. Maybe it was better than the present for them? Just maybe. About other groups I know nothing about, except from my impressions of them, which may be totally misleading. "Who are they?" I often wonder. "Are they as happy as I am? What are their stories?"

I wish their lives were cheerful, like their faces when they stroll in the morning sun or emerge from Starbucks with an aromatic cup of coffee in their hand. But I imagine that, despite my wishful thinking, for most people these are the only fleeting moments of happiness that they cherish for the rest of the day (I had to do the same when I worked in the gray, dreary cubicles for over two years). I imagine that despite their cheerfulness, most people are fighting with what is unspoken, as Azar Nafisi put it in her beautiful memoir, The Things I've Been Silent About, "At some point, the unarticulated, that which is silenced and stifled, becomes as important as what is said, if not more" (p. 56). It is not a new idea. Annie Rogers, for instance, describes how she listens to and analyzes the conversations with abused girls, in order to help them articulate and overcome their traumatic experiences. Yet, the "unspoken," or the "unsayable," as Rogers refers to it, is crucial for happiness and personal or social changes to occur.

"You need to be able to articulate something," Nafisi reminds us, "if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists" (p. 56). Hard as it is to acknowledge and tackle the "unspoken," it is worth the effort. For it does not disappear into the thin air; it remains "malignant," Nafisi tells us. So when I walk down the street and see the passers-by, I wish them courage. Courage not to hide their problems and cheat themselves, but the courage to face the "unspoken" with humility and humanity. If we accept it as part of our lives, a puzzle or a challenge to be solved, rather than an obstacle, it will makes us all stronger and wiser in the end.

I do not wish to sound as somebody with their head in the clouds. I truly believe in this philosophy and hope to propagate. I strove to incorporate it into the course about socio-cultural taboos that I was recently teaching, and I want to make it a part of my novel that I am working on, about gays, the lack of self-expression in the arts, about the war and intolerance. If my work has made or will make somebody's heart scream, first with frustration and then with joy, I will fly, fly, high above the streets, high above the trees, and settle on cloud nine. Getting there, I realize, takes a long time. So for now, Annie and Azar, thank you for taling about the unspoken.