Respect the Pause

Growing up, my mother had a whole bunch of sweet pet names for me, most of them in Turkish, all of them dripping with love. One of them was “sabırsız”, which means impatient. And while she always said it with a smile or a gentle shake of her head, it was, and remains, painfully accurate.

I am impatient. Impulsive. And, at times, decidedly impossible.

I’ve carried this charming little personality trait well into adulthood, though these days, I try harder than ever to reign it in. Because part of adulting is realizing that, if I make a mistake, mommy’s no longer there to clean up the mess, call the teacher, or explain away the explosion. At some point, I had to learn how to pause before I say something sharp, send something stupid, or spiral into something self-destructive.

Pausing doesn’t come easily to people like me, wired to go, do, fix, fight back. Add to that a few unfortunate chapters in my life marked by violence, war zones, and abusive relationships, and you’ve got someone hardwired for anxiety. What might seem like a minor slight to someone else can register as a full-blown alarm bell on steroids in my nervous system. So yes, my reactions to certain things can sometimes be disproportionate.

It took plenty of minor embarrassments and a few major regrets to finally reach this epiphany. I still remember one particularly volatile moment: standing in the backyard, clutching a box of matches over a pile of my first ex-husband’s designer suits, absolutely fuming. I didn’t think. I just acted. And while, to be honest, he did deserve the firestorm that ensued, I’ll admit it wasn’t my finest hour. It gave him the perfect ammunition to call me crazy, rather than take responsibility for his actions that drove me there.

That was fifteen years and a thousand versions of me ago. I know better now than to let my emotions get the very best of me, especially when I’m triggered. When that flare-up hits, I know, I know, I have to immediately hit pause. Step back. Put down the phone. Close the laptop. Maybe even lock the door and stay home for the rest of the whole entire day. This is not a drill. Because anything I say or do from that state will not lead to anything good. It will be from a place of pain. And I’ve learned the hard way how much damage, sometimes irreparable, that can cause.

The power of the pause is everywhere you look. In public speaking, the most effective delivery isn’t just in the words themselves, but also in the spaces between them. A well-placed pause can make a message land with far more gravitas than a rambling monologue. Silence, when used intentionally, commands attention. It can also be the difference between a good joke and a great one. Think of your favorite comedian: timing is everything. They let the audience laugh. They don’t barrel through their set.

I remember, early in the life of this column, back when I was still getting used to reading them out loud, I listened to the audio of one of my personal recordings and just froze. The producer had scrubbed out all the natural pauses in my speech, tightening the spaces between paragraphs so much that I sounded like I wasn’t even stopping to take a breath. Just one long, endless blur of words. I freaked out and, in struggling to explain the nature of my discontent, I said: “You need to respect the pause.” I may have uttered the phrase in frustration at the time, but now I want to slap it on mugs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers.

We live in a world that seems allergic to silence. Where people listen to voice messages at chipmunk speed just to “save time.” We binge-watch, doom-scroll, half-read and double-tap our way through life. We get itchy when the Wi-Fi lags, impatient when someone walks too slowly in front of us or takes a second too long to reply, and anxious when we’re kept waiting at a red light or a doctor’s office with nothing but our own thoughts. We consume information like fast food—quick, cheap, and unsatisfying—and we rarely give ourselves the time to properly digest any of it.

Maybe being Armenian makes me understand the value of the pause, even if I’ve never been particularly good at it. Ours is an ancient culture that values depth over immediacy, ritual over rush. We’re a people who let our food simmer for hours, who gather at tables for long conversations that stretch well into the night, who mark both joy and grief with days, weeks, even months of collective reflection. We’ve had no choice but to wait: for justice, for recognition, for peace that doesn’t vanish with the news cycle. That kind of communal patience is in the soil, the songs, and the way my grandparents used to sip their tea slowly while staring out the window. I didn’t inherit their patience, but I’m learning to borrow from it.

I still mess up. Still blurt the thing, send the angry email, snap the snarky reply. But less. These days, I catch myself sooner. I’ve built a little toolkit of practices to self-regulate and self-soothe, though sometimes, especially under extreme stress, I might forget where I put it. Still, more often now, I surprise myself by not reacting. And in those moments, when I let things percolate, marinate, and dissipate, I feel a kind of superpower that no hasty outburst could ever give me: the power of choosing my response instead of being hijacked by my reaction.

So, here’s to the pause.
May we learn to trust it.
To respect it.
And maybe even to enjoy it.

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Listen to Sheila’s personal reading of “Respect the Pause”.

Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations. Now based in Yerevan, she regularly consults for a variety of international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and governments.