What is being the Voice?

So often, we misidentify the use of our voice. We grow up believing that unless we are screaming, unless we are shouting, unless we are forcing our way through, we do not truly have a voice. But what if this is a misconception we inherited rather than a truth?

Perhaps it came from the echo of someone overbearing, someone whose voice filled every space with weight and demand, and we decided we would never allow ourselves to become that.

Perhaps it came from the silence of someone suppressed, hushed into invisibility, and we vowed we would never allow ourselves to become that either. In our attempts to avoid both extremes, we abandoned the most precious thing of all: the freedom of choice.

Choice allows us to be silent when silence creates more.

Choice allows us to be loud when loudness is what is required.

Choice allows us to speak, not from force or volume, but from presence—the presence of being the source of the reality we desire.

To be the source means to no longer wait for others to tell us what is right, no longer shape ourselves to fit the contours of what someone else desires us to be, no longer keep looking back for reassurance that someone is still there to catch us if we fall.

To be the source means we refuse to be diminished by lies, however sweetly they are wrapped.

If we are not choosing this, then we are only recycling the realities of our parents, our partners, our friends—realities dressed in the thin icing of palatability, but never our own creation.

And what if you were never here to be a carefully prepared, digestible piece of cake? What if you were here to be the storm that turns the air electric, the wind that alters landscapes, the force of change that refuses to be contained?