Finding your voice in the crowded sea of the internet
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czeslaw Milosz
Here’s the fear: What if I’m not saying anything original? How do I find my voice?
Your Voice Is…
What you care most deeply about.
What you’re a stand for.
What you most want to heal in the world.
What you’d say or do or your affect when acting from your kindest self.
How you’d speak to someone when they are vulnerable and coming to you, for help.
Your enthusiasm, lightness, and joy.
Your shadowy, pissed-off righteousness.
To access it, you…
You look for what you most want to say, even if it’s not an original thought, and you say it.
You look at what no one is saying, and you say that.
You ask yourself what the people who are most disenfranchised need you to say, for them, because they don’t have the same privilege and access.
You ask yourself what the people with the most power aren’t saying.
How You Access It
You access it by not thinking that you “lost” it, as if “your voice” is your keys, misplaced somewhere.
You have a voice. You have a vision. It’s uniquely yours. It’s informed by your life experience and it will show itself, if you stop buying in to the fear.
Then, you treat writing or speaking into a microphone or being on camera like a craft. This means that you probably won’t articulate it easily, at first.
No one who is committed to her craft waits until it’s perfect, to begin.
If you have something to say, and if you want to say it well, then you’ve got to start talking. Your voice will emerge.
Stop Buying In
If you feel like you have something to say, but you’re worried that what you have to say sounds exactly like what everyone else online is saying, there’s actually one big thing that I recommend above all else:
Stop buying in to that belief system.
How are you buying in? By ruminating on it while doing nothing to shift it. If you know that this belief system stops you, frustrates you, ties you into knots, stop rolling over and playing dead, thinking that golly-gee-gosh, someday you’ll have an a-ha of divine intervention where you’re never plagued by it, again.
When you choose to do nothing to change a belief system that stops you from being all of who you are, you waste years of your life in this space–and the world needs your voice.
Stop thinking that it’s all been said, before, because it hasn’t already been done or said, by you.
That might involve longer term work where you learn how to recognize, and then work with, the inner critic voices.
Or, you might find your way on your own. Be auto-didactic! Meditate and notice your thoughts, journal, walk through the fire, enlist a friend. If you start paying attention, you’ll find the answers that you need.
If you start paying attention, you’ll also “find” your voice, because it was never lost. The issue at hand isn’t finding. The issue at hand is consciously cultivating the conditions for the things that you desire, to emerge. As always, the choice is yours.