“We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time."
I recently lost my voice. Not my audible voice but the voice that tells the truth of who I am, what I feel, and what has happened to me. Someone I deeply loved, who I thought loved me, read my blog and said that I try to portray myself as a victim, I lean into it, but I'm not a victim at all. Years of writing where I was vulnerable, honest, and transparent were taken away with those few words. I lost the desire to write. I lost my voice.
I contemplated what was said to see if there was any truth. Though I have been victimized, I saw my writing as a way to work through it and show a life of someone that had overcome unfathomable things. Were there aspects of my experience where I still felt and behaved as a victim? Probably. Am I also crazy resilient and have created a life for myself that no one expected possible? Absolutely.
I live life out loud. I swore I'd never be silenced as I had in the past. A lifetime of being told I'm too loud, too opinionated, and too much, and I had decided that to be my authentic self, you could take it or leave it but I'm not changing. And then I got small.
I would start to write and nothing came out. In my previous posts they came quickly, very stream of consciousness, with few edits. I just said it. Yet now judgement loomed large over me. My writing which I'd been proud of now felt embarrassing. I'd laid myself out there only to be told it was something I should have hidden, stuffed down, and certainly not shared publicly.
This past year has been one of the hardest of my life for loss. I lost my baby kitty who loved me unconditionally and though scared of most everyone else, lived for me. It was a quick and tragic death that I still sob about daily while smiling when I see you in person. I lost my job that I loved. I'd never loved a job but I did love this one. I stupidly wanted to stay until retirement. But as so often happens in life, it was taken away. I lost the person I considered to be the love of my life. Month after month of having something that meant so much to me to be suddenly gone.
I'm sad. I'm destroyed. Am I being a victim now?
This post has been in draft form for months. I go to publish and I'm immobilized. Then I saw this quote from Alan Watts "Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone.”
My voice is back.