I must have been around seven years of age when my mother first taught me to talk like a lady. Around ten, a schoolteacher reprimanded me for being too angry when expressing my opinion. Around twelve, a tutor told me not to question everything and to accept certain facts as they were.
For a long time, I thought having a voice meant knowing what to say. More importantly, knowing the right thing to say. I learned early how to make sentences sound intelligent, arguments more palatable, and my own thoughts edited to sound more acceptable so that I could be taken seriously in classrooms, courtrooms and even in personal conversations. What I did not learn was to ask myself: What do I want to say? Perhaps I had to wait until my mid-twenties to begin trusting that nagging inner voice. That was my journey, dear reader, to owning my voice. It certainly does not have to take you that long.
We women spend so much of our lives learning how to sound acceptable. Speak, but not too loudly. Be intelligent, but not intimidating. Be ambitious but remain pleasant. Have opinions but know when to keep them to yourself. Eventually, you become very good at editing yourself. I, too, like many other highly qualified women, became very good at it. Before someone else could tell me that something was too angry, too political, too personal, or too uncomfortable, I had already replayed it a hundred times in my head and edited out the unsavoury parts before I ever opened my mouth.
Perhaps that is what took me so long to understand about writing: sometimes the biggest obstacle between a writer and her voice is not a lack of words. It is fear—the fear of being misunderstood, disliked, considered excessive, or revealing too much of yourself. But writing became the place where I could no longer pretend that I did not see what I saw. I kept returning to issues concerning women, violence, power, institutions, and the strange ways ordinary lives are shaped by structures much larger than us. I wrote about things that made others uncomfortable because they were already making me uncomfortable in my day-to-day life. Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to make the truth palatable for society at large.
This was the beginning of finding my own voice. I don't think it happens in one dramatic moment. It happens gradually: a sentence you almost delete but don't, a subject you were afraid to touch but return to anyway, a metaphor that sounds unmistakably like you, a poem that makes you think, I don't know if anyone will like this, but I know I mean it. Perhaps having a voice is not about being universally understood. It is about recognising yourself in what you have written.
My voice has become an intersection of the things I have studied, the things I have survived, the things I have questioned, and the things I still don't understand. Life has taught me the hardest lesson: becoming yourself authentically often requires letting go of the version of yourself that everyone else had become comfortable with.
I am still finding my voice. I suspect I always will. Maybe that is the point. A voice changes as you do; it sheds its old lexicon, expands its vocabulary, abandons old terminology, and becomes less interested in seeking acceptance. These days, when I write, I try not to ask whether I am saying the right thing. I ask whether I am saying my thing. Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes I am still scrambling to find the words that best express what I feel, trying to sound like a real writer, whatever that means. So, I begin again, and again. Somewhere between the sentences I cross out and the words that survive, I hear it.
Not a louder or more perfect voice.
Just my own voice, unedited.