Cultivating The Voice

I believed in the power of sharing but, along the way, became fearful of my own unique voice…

The social media soapbox is more accessible than ever and yet so few, still, choose to participate. Until recently, I too was a voracious reader but part of the silent majority.

We spend so much of our time consuming but little time producing. And it’s such a shame. Each voice is unique and worthy of consideration. It would do the world better to fill our mediums with more content and less vapid commentary.

This is not to say that we should all flap our arms and shout out the window to fall on deaf ears. Noise for the sake of noise is not progress.

A voice is cultivated, not found.

And now I am creating my own. And it’s terrifying. And I want to give up.

And it’s hard.

And I too once stood in the crowd as a great orator woke within me a seed that only now, many years later, brings fruit.

What I’ve come to find is that my fears of being judged were unfounded. The reality is much worse. That in speaking my mind the world is not critical but indifferent. And that makes for a lonely existence. As I should have known — writers have long mused on the solitary life of the craft.

But in this silence, I found a freedom. And this has made me love again. Love the craft for all it can create and every moment it can dare express. In the silence, I found a garden to cultivate my creativity, my ideas turning over like manure.

And what I’ve come to find is that a voice must bore through the stillness if it can ever hope to find another soul. And to connect is to share in the greatest gift we can never create alone — that of relationship.

We build our life and self-identity alone but this can only take us so far. To take the next step is to overcome the fear of opinion and to realize another plane exists between private and public — that of anonymity. And this is where the most personal work comes to fruition. And this is where the flaws bleed most raw. And this is where a voice is cultivated further until it breaks through to the goal we sought all along — to be heard and understood, but mostly understood.