Where is your voice?

When you find yourself quite, not speaking up, numbed and silent, you wonder. What happened? Where did your voice go? What happened to your speech? Where is your opinion about the situation? Do you even have a voice?

It is sad to see the environment around us from family background to culture and society in general sending you signs to numb your voice and suppress your opinions. When the brain is so young, it picks up such cues very fast and owns them as if they were ours in the first place.

Examples of such signals are the structured context we live in where you experience people in different roles and positions like students and teachers, children and parents and employees and bosses. This kind of structure tells you: You are lower. He is higher and superior. You need to follow and listen. You must do what you are being told. You have no right to argue or disagree. Just fit in and follow along.

With the social media nowadays and the internet, it is interesting to witness people coming up with their individual voices.

After understanding your background and what happened to your voice, then an interesting question comes up: If that is the case, where did my voice go? What is my opinion about the situation? What do I really think if I stop thinking about what others think? Is it really that others have voices and I don’t? If I do have a voice, what is it? What does it say? What it wants and doesn’t want?

At the beginning, you may find no answers if your brain got used to the habit of suppressing and go silent. But with time and patient, you would gradually start getting to know your voice. Have empathy and curiosity. Be aware of the internal critics and judgment. Be tender and kind. Because your voice at the beginning is very vulnerable and weak. It might be so justifying, explaining and asking for permission every time you explore it. It is fine. Be with it step by step. Until you get to know it, be friends and eventually you would use it in a balanced way in your day to day life.

All the best finding your voice.