Quiet Fire

There was a time I thought silence would kill me. 

As a young Black girl, I was born into noise – the kind that bruises rather than moves. The chaos around me was full of sound, yet none of it seemed to speak to me. Certainly not the sound of violins or sonatas drifting from behind expensive doors. Those spaces felt far away, built of marble and money, where the music seemed to belong to whiteness, to privilege, to cold perfection. It didn’t belong to girls like me. Or so I believed. 

In my home, sadness had no name. Depression was not spoken of; emotion was swallowed, not shared. So when breath became burden and home felt like a cage of unspoken grief, hiding pain even from myself, unable to describe the heaviness that lived in me, 

I didn’t expect to reach sixteen

But I’m writing this…and I owe that to two things: God, and music. Not just any music. Not the chaotic noise from car windows or city streets – but something stiller. The quiet ache of piano keys. The slow, sorrowful exhale of strings. It was Chopin who first looked at me without flinching. His Nocturnes did not try to rescue me – they recognised me. In them, my sadness wasn’t a flaw to be fixed. It was mirrored, shaped, and made sacred. For the first time, something outside of me whispered: I know. 

I was thirteen when my soul began to unravel. I lived in a house where depression was dressed in silence, where pain was inherited like furniture – present, but never acknowledged. I learned to suffer politely. Smiling while drowning. By night, I carved my sorrow into skin, praying to feel something that didn’t ache.

I didn’t expect to see sixteen. 

But God had other plans. And music became the thread that held me here. There was something sacred in the stillness. Something honest. The way a cello could cry without shame, how a single unresolved chord could echo the kind of emptiness I felt but could not name. Chopin didn’t save me in the traditional sense. He didn’t lift me out of my grief – he walked into it with me. His music didn’t ask me to be happy. It understood my sadness. And in those wordless laments, I found expression without speech. I didn’t need lyrics. The music held what I could not name. It cradled the chaos inside me with both gentleness and power. It terrified me – how seen I felt. But it soothed me, too. I had never known silence could speak so loudly. 

As someone grounded in faith, I often felt disoriented by the messages in popular music – rhythms that stirred the body but starved the soul. Classical music became my middle ground – a sacred, wordless worship. Classical music gave me something different. It was pure, unfiltered emotion. It didn’t sell me a story. It let me tell my own. 

And I did. Through poetry. Through spoken word. Writing gave that voice somewhere to live. It became the backdrop to my becoming – a heartbeat under every poem, a breath behind every verse. I wrote survival stories to cello sonatas. I cried through études, and the ache inside me began to loosen. It didn’t erase the pain. But it made it art. It made it... beautiful?

Today, at sixteen, I am no longer just surviving. I am healing. Revising for GCSEs to the soft hush of strings; I’m one of eight elected UK Youth Parliament members. I speak not just from pain, but from purpose. The fire that once threatened to consume me now fuels me. 

And classical music? It asked nothing of me. It didn’t care where I came from, or how much I hurt. It simply let me feel. And in a world that so often erases girls like me – that was everything. 

Because the world may never stop being loud. Grief may never fully leave me. But in the hush between notes, in the spaces where melody becomes memory, I find myself. Not broken. Not defeated. But a fired spark. 

So no – I’m not a musical prodigy. I can’t name every movement or translate every score. 

But I am a symphony of survival.

And sometimes, survival sounds like silence. Sometimes, it sounds like Chopin. 

So as a young Black girl born into noise, I found solace in the silence.