This pitch letter is part of The Open Notebook’s Pitch Database, which contains 312 successful pitches to a wide range of publications. To share your own successful pitch, please fill out this form.
When I was 23 years old, I lost my silence. It was way harder than one might expect when losing something that wasn’t there. Instead, I started hearing a ringing. A ghost sound that ironically wasn’t real either, but its everlasting presence wouldn’t let me think otherwise.
Tinnitus is the name of this relatively common condition. One that, at first, makes you feel like you are being chased by a careless hunter who doesn’t care to hide its face. That is precisely what makes it so frustrating, the sense of powerlessness that it gives. The fact that it’s always there, in cases like mine with little to no chance of ever going away, and with no real or effective treatment.
Silence was something that I cherished enormously, but its absence made me realize the immense weight that we put into intangibles, especially in the acoustic world. It’s a loud cry that signals the beginning of a life, which then ends with silence. There are silences of complicity, awkward silences, minutes of silence to show solidarity and some of our biggest punishments are solitary confinement and cancel culture. We acknowledge sound everywhere we exist, and I think silence should be broken, as it was broken in me, to recognize its value.
I want to write an essay about the impact silence has had on us, as societies and animals, and how through my grief I learned to find it everywhere, even though I no longer perceive it.
“Eulogy for Silence”
This pitch letter is part of The Open Notebook’s Pitch Database, which contains 312 successful pitches to a wide range of publications. To share your own successful pitch, please fill out this form.
The Story
“Eulogy for Silence”
https://aeon.co/essays/in-memory-of-all-that-i-lost-when-tinnitus-took-away-my-silence
by Diego Ramírez Martín del Campo
Aeon, June 14, 2024
The Pitch
When I was 23 years old, I lost my silence. It was way harder than one might expect when losing something that wasn’t there. Instead, I started hearing a ringing. A ghost sound that ironically wasn’t real either, but its everlasting presence wouldn’t let me think otherwise.
Tinnitus is the name of this relatively common condition. One that, at first, makes you feel like you are being chased by a careless hunter who doesn’t care to hide its face. That is precisely what makes it so frustrating, the sense of powerlessness that it gives. The fact that it’s always there, in cases like mine with little to no chance of ever going away, and with no real or effective treatment.
Silence was something that I cherished enormously, but its absence made me realize the immense weight that we put into intangibles, especially in the acoustic world. It’s a loud cry that signals the beginning of a life, which then ends with silence. There are silences of complicity, awkward silences, minutes of silence to show solidarity and some of our biggest punishments are solitary confinement and cancel culture. We acknowledge sound everywhere we exist, and I think silence should be broken, as it was broken in me, to recognize its value.
I want to write an essay about the impact silence has had on us, as societies and animals, and how through my grief I learned to find it everywhere, even though I no longer perceive it.