finding voice, claiming courage
“Blogging is easy,” said Helen Chang, the informed instructor of my writing-for-the-web class. ”If you can talk, you can blog.”
The path of self-discovery can present an opportunity to encounter everyday magic.
That seems simple enough, I thought. I felt encouraged to go home and start talking right away….which would surely lead to writing. My two yearning WordPress blogs — the ones I’d set-up weeks ago, but had yet to start filling with captivating entries — would finally have a purpose. I would open the floodgates to my own expression. It was really going to happen at last.
Helen then went on to elaborate: “Your voice is more important than what you say. Everyone’s talking about the same things, but no one’s saying it the way you can. Find your voice, and you’ll be set.”
A cold ball formed in my stomach: third chakra, the seat of identity and personal power. Who I am in the world. Who I want to be. And, the void in between.
Find my voice? Anxiety pinged around my brain as fearful thoughts careened off each other. What if I didn’t have a voice? (What did I really think, anyway? Did I have opinions?) Or, worse, what if my voice was awful: boring, insipid, uninteresting, silly.
I hoped my voice was something I might be able to find under the couch cushions, like a lost dollar bill. In that case, I could take distraction-action: cast a spell for discovery, mobilize a search team, write it off, get a replacement…or do any number of other non-writing activities that would keep me from facing what was surely my lack-of-voice.
Writer and therapist Deena Metzer says that “…writing, whether for ourselves or for others, takes courage — the courage to confront ourselves, as well as the courage to confront others.”
As a long-time public relations and marketing writer, I was confident about creating words and points of view to represent clients and their business products and services. I was good at getting that outside voice right: the tone, the grammar, the spelling, the pitch. That kind of writing, though often challenging, was not a threat. But, to put myself out there — my voice, my POV, my words — and probably not get it “right” a lot of the time (I mean, how can you ever get it right for everyone all the time?)….that was something else.
It came to me a day later that perhaps my voice was something that could be salvaged from junk, like found art. This seemed comforting. I could produce work of any type or caliber, and my voice would start to shine through. Once identified, I could pluck it out and put it to more artful use.
Michelle Russell of the blog Practice Makes Imperfect encourages us all to publish the most horrible blog post ever, just to get it out there. ”By just writing something and hitting the ‘Publish’ button, you’ll train yourself to overcome your inner demons.”
As my web writing class came to a close, one of the glass-half-full fellow attendees exclaimed about our blogs, “Well, think of it this way: probably no one will be reading them, anyway.”
With that encouraging thought in mind, let the junk-writing, horrible blog posting, mining for voice, and the courage start now!
