Wandering around the BBC, I came across this article about five people participating in a Jesuit “silent retreat” in response to modern life getting more noisy.

The article itself has some interesting bits about the modern worlds obsession with always on communication but the best bit is the following quote from one of the five volunteers (emphasis mine) :

So it seems staying silent for eight minutes could be a challenge, never mind eight days.

“I actually thought I was going to spontaneously combust for about two days at the beginning,” says Carrie Lloyd, another volunteer.

“I thought it would physically injure me being silent for that long.”

Carrie is 29 and is on sabbatical from a job as head of PR for an advertising firm to write a film. She thinks she knows why so many of us fear silence.

“I found silence quite frightening because I didn’t know what it was going to bring up,” she says.

“We all knew we were going to face up to things we didn’t want to face. I had massive belly cries, clinging-to-the-wall cries but they’re actually quite cathartic. In the end, what we found out was it wasn’t half as daunting as I thought it would be.”

I am not sure whether to categorise her as a drama queen or a total fucking loon, although I wonder if it related to her first name at all?