silence as the strategy, and its promise
I expend energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, empty, my eyes two great pale zeros. People have promised to get me through this.
Context
The response to a body that garbles everything it emits is to emit nothing: total silence held at real cost, the face emptied to two pale zeros, on the strength of a promise that this plan will work. Naming it "People have promised to get me through this" makes the muteness a coached policy rather than shyness, which is why the scene reads as the failure of a strategy and not a temperament.