From Silence to Script: How Power Learns to Speak Through Us
Ash & Bloom Journal · Week 1
Power rarely announces itself.
It doesn’t always arrive as violence or overt domination. More often, it enters quietly—through repetition, tone, expectation. Through the stories we are told about who we are allowed to be, what is “appropriate,” and which versions of ourselves are safest to present to the world.
Before power is enforced externally, it is rehearsed internally.
This is where narrative begins its work.
As a child, I learned quickly which emotions were welcomed and which were punished. Anger was labeled disrespect. Curiosity was framed as defiance. Silence, however, was rewarded. Over time, this pattern solidified into an internal script: safety comes from compliance. The story did not need to be spoken aloud to be effective; it lived in my body, shaping decisions before conscious thought intervened.
Narrative, in this way, functions less as a story we tell and more as a structure we inhabit.
Scholars of power have long argued that domination is most effective when it no longer requires force. Michel Foucault describes this internalization as the point at which authority becomes self-regulating—when individuals monitor and correct themselves according to invisible norms rather than explicit commands. What interests me is not only how these norms are produced, but how they are narrated—how they become legible, reasonable, even moral in the stories we inherit.
This internalization is not neutral. It is shaped by race, gender, class, and relational positioning. For marginalized individuals, narrative becomes a survival technology. We learn which stories to tell in order to be believed, protected, or left alone. Over time, these survival narratives calcify into identity, making resistance feel not only dangerous, but disloyal—to family, to culture, to self.
Yet narrative is not only a mechanism of control. It is also the primary site of resistance.
When individuals begin to re-author their experiences—naming manipulation as manipulation, reframing obedience as conditioning rather than virtue—the power of the original script weakens. What once felt like personal failure is revealed as structural design. Shame gives way to analysis. Analysis creates distance. Distance makes choice possible.
This re-narration is not a single moment but a practice. It requires returning to memories, language, and emotional responses with new interpretive tools. It asks: Who benefits from this story? Who is silenced by it? What alternative reading becomes possible if I shift the frame?
In my own work, I am increasingly interested in how informal, non-academic narrative spaces—journals, blogs, oral storytelling, digital essays—function as early sites of this reclamation. These spaces allow for theory to emerge from lived experience rather than being imposed upon it. They are messy, emotional, and iterative. But they are also generative.
This blog exists in that in-between space: not quite memoir, not quite theory, but intentionally both.
If narrative is the mechanism through which power is internalized, then public reflection becomes one of the first places it can be resisted. To write is not merely to recount, but to interrogate. To name is to loosen. To share is to destabilize the fiction that these experiences are isolated or individual.
Reclaiming narrative does not erase harm. But it does interrupt its ability to define us.
And that interruption—small, imperfect, ongoing—is where blooming begins.