The Road to Finding My Voice
On healing from trauma, revising my narrative, and being bold
Dear reader,
It’s 3:38 AM in Denver. I’m sitting on my couch feeling an inkling of selfishness after guiding Arrow out of our bedroom and downstairs with me. I wanted the company. He was fast asleep when I woke him, but I had been lying in bed awake since 12:59 AM. When he nuzzled his face into mine and pleaded to be let outside for a poo.
All’s fair, right?
It took me nearly three hours to stop writing in my head, disentangle my limbs from my toddler, and finally start writing in real time. Less imagination, more action.
To be honest, I don’t entirely mind it. Being awake at this hour. The house is quiet. So too is the world outside. The neighborhood is still blanketed in night. Not a single window is lit up from within. I’m imagining constellations of stars outside of our living room window, somewhere far above the cloud cover. It sounds serene, doesn’t it?
Last week, my husband interviewed me on the podcast he runs for our company. As soon as he hit record, I broke out in a nervous fit of laughter. He looked at me peculiarly. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m excited to be here…and really nervous,” I offered. “This is the first time I’ve been interviewed by someone who knows everything about me.”
He laughed, acknowledging the truth in what I had just shared. It’s worth noting, my dear reader, that my dear husband had not filled me in on the direction of the interview. “I don’t want it to feel scripted,” he explained. Well, rest assured it was not scripted. He had a list of questions to which I was not made privy. So, I was understandably nervous.
He took no more than five minutes to dive into a softball of a question.
“So, tell me about Mizzou and losing your voice.”
Tim Ferriss would have at the very least warmed me up to such a prying question, but my husband is a less sensitive man. We seem to balance one another out in that way. In any matter, I was thrown into the deep end. No life raft or buoy offered, he patiently waited for me to dive into a story that has never ventured beyond the walls of our home.
The remaining hour of the interview was more of the same, as you can imagine. It was a conversation that we’ve had in the comfort of the very couch I’m sitting on now. Only this time, it was recorded with the intention of airing publicly.
And, that it will. On Wednesday, in fact. A mere 48 hours away. You may be wondering if that is why I’m painfully awake at such an alarming time, to which I would answer, “You bet your ass.”
I meant it when I told my husband that I was excited for the interview. Now, in this liminal space between recording and airing, I’m equal parts excited and appalled. Already emotionally hungover from the vulnerability.
I’m running up against an upper limit. Steven Pressfield would call this Resistance. And, he would be correct in that brief summation of the monstrosity of a battle waging inside of me. So, instead of waiting for the episode to be aired, I’m proactively outing myself now. It’s the only way I know how to counteract the instinctive urge to run and hide.
Opposite action, as I’ve so often mentioned.
This is the point of no return. All of my healing has prepared me for this moment, this debut of vocalizing my story and my truth. Important pieces of it, at least. The theme of the interview was unlocking my voice; when I had lost it, key moments that highlight the estrangement, and what finally helped me recover it. Yet, as I’ve explained to my husband, it is one thing to confidently use my voice with him: the safest person. And another thing altogether to use my voice with the world.
Yet, it’s a leap that must be taken. Why now?
Because each of us has an innate desire to be known. Because my grandma used her deathbed to tell me to start speaking up. Because I am a mother and therefore my daughter’s inescapable template for freedom, peace, and fierce shamelessness. She will know without a shadow of a doubt that she has a voice if, and only if, I use mine. And finally, because I’m well enough to. I have healed enough to. I have found purpose in the pain, and the next intuitive step feels like creating a message from the mess.
“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” — Aldous Huxley
I didn’t understand the importance of perspective until I changed mine.
As I share in the interview, and as I have shared here many times, my healing journey has been long and winding. There have been countless peaks, valleys, and plateaus. Now, taking in where I am and looking back on where I’ve been, I can see how my journey has unfolded in three distinct chapters. All equally important, and equally fundamental for unlocking my voice. I’ll call them:
The uncovering.
The messy middle.
And, the meaning making.
The crucial first step was decisively digging into my past with a willingness to look at the trauma and pain. I had to stop running, numbing, and denying; which obliterated the house of cards I had built through years of pretending. I retired the good girl mask and dug my hands into uncovering my authentic self.
Which inevitably required uncovering what the good girl had kept hidden.
The good girl couldn’t say what she had been through. What she had felt. What she was still feeling. The good girl couldn’t acknowledge the monsters, or the trauma, or the dirty laundry. She couldn’t go there, because there was not good.
So, uncovering required taking everything that had not been said, felt, or acknowledged and laying it out on the floor of my psyche. Out of the compartmentalized boxes, in the open. Tired of being good and aching to feel free, I stared at the contents of my life until everything — all of me — was revealed.
Then came the feeling, processing, and releasing. The messy, mucky middle.
While my healing began with mentally understanding the impact of my history, it would remain perpetually incomplete if I stopped before physically feeling what was never felt. There is no forward movement without feeling.
I know this firsthand. Emotions without motion become stagnant; our own life force energy stymied.
I progressed from mind to body between these two phases. Gradually, I learned that my body was no longer something to fight, but instead a resilient conduit for release and integration. The knot in my throat loosened. The walls around my heart softened.
After the pain had been felt, I could feel something new. My life force waking up; tingling in my fingers and toes. Admittedly, there is much more to this phase; the bulk of which I explain in the interview. The messy middle deserves its own 5,000 word article. Or, 50,000 word memoir.
Eventually, all of the feeling created an opening within me. And in that opening, I was free to explore the meaning of my life. Who my soul is, what my life has entailed, and how I would write each of the experiences into my story. I was thrust into the third phase of my healing.
After decades of shame-based scripts, I decided that I was open for revision. I fearlessly edited my autobiography. I believe that individuals with the deepest understanding of their soul are those who have experienced the deepest, darkest, and lowest moments in life. Because it’s there, stripped down and raw, that we come into contact with our most essential and basic nature.
In the bottom-most moments, I learned that my soul is a writer. So, I took responsibility as the author of my life. I unlocked my voice with pen and paper, and started ascribing meaning to my experiences with attention, intention, and devotion to alignment. I changed my perspective and poured myself into purpose.
Not, “What was the purpose?”
But instead, “What is my purpose?”
Not, “Why did this happen to me?”
But instead, “How has this revealed what is destined and designed to move through me?”
I stopping looking backwards, and started looking forwards.
And everything changed.
I discovered my message, I uncovered my voice.
And now, I am using them both.
Thank you for being here, and for caring to listen.