I've Lost My Voice

I've been struggling with writing from the heart these days. I explore what it means to be authentic and passionate, and in the process regain some of what I lost.

I’ve lost my voice. Every blog I write feels wrong. I want to convey meaning to you, but my words wouldn’t reach you if I tried. They are messy and incomplete. I know that something is missing, but I don’t know the magic ingredient to make it all come together.

The further I get into this blogging thing, the more I start to feel boxed in. People come to expect certain things from me, but somehow I’m not quite sure what exactly that is. My sense of self is fragmented and never quite the same. Consistency is anything but my middle name. I want to be authentic but I don’t know what that is. Is it honesty? Because I’m honest, maybe to a fault, but somehow that doesn’t feel quite right either.

Nothing I write feels…right.

Even this. I want to delete this. But somehow it feels closer to me than anything I’ve written in my attempt to convey my feelings. I tell myself so many things.

Be professional

Be authentic

Be interesting

I don’t want to.

Okay, roll that back. It’s not that I don’t want to be those things. I’d love to be all three. What I don’t want is the constant noise in the back of my head that’s trying to control my writing. So It’s just easy to reject those concepts, those things, that I feel are tearing apart my writing and making it into something wrong. I can change how I write. Certain projects call for different types of prose. But here on my Substack, I just want to be me.

I believe in writing for yourself as well as writing for others. I think it’s a spectrum like everything else. Some people may write solely for themselves or other people, but I think most people are a mix of both. Writing is communication, sometimes with other people and sometimes with yourself.

I feel like I keep miscommunicating, both with myself and others. I always struggle when I talk to people because I want to say the “right” thing at any given time. It’s like if I don’t do the exact thing needed, the world will end. But there isn’t always a right thing to say. Often there are countless ways to express yourself that are all valid. Sometimes, I get that. I can be free. But other times I’m trapped. With writing, I’m always freer, because there isn’t a direct person interacting with me. Eventually someone will read this, but right now as I type, I am totally free. Yet, I’ve started imagining you because you actually exist now. Some people listen to my rambles (which I am totally grateful for), so I’ve begun trying to figure out the right answer for my audience. Which some might say is good or smart, and maybe it is.

But I don’t like it.

Maybe that’s what this comes down to. Me straining against these feelings of responsibility when writing used to just be for me. It didn’t have to make sense…these rambles really could just be rambles, you know? Now, they have to be something more. I want them to be. I love creating meaning that is shared by not only me, but others.

But what is my voice?

What am I trying to say?

Maybe those aren’t the right questions. At least not for me. What is caught in my heart right now? What do I have to speak about or I will burst? What matters to me? What makes me passionate?

It’s not about authenticity, it’s about passion.

Haha, I wrote so many attempts at blogs about passion over the past couple of days, but none of them felt right. Passion is such a beautiful, incandescent topic that I wanted to express so much on, but I couldn’t find the right words. I couldn’t understand why it meant so much for me to talk about it.

But that’s the thing. My heart wasn’t ready to talk about passion.

It wanted this. It needed this.

Finding myself again and knowing the words to say. Because passion is about knowing a truth about yourself–I love baking or I love my partner or I love writing–and I had misplaced my truths. Expressing your love for something is the embodiment of passion. Fiery, chaotic love. I lost sight of myself, and what brings me to life. Losing who I am and misplacing my adoration in the pursuit of perfection, of meeting standards that I don’t understand. I had forgotten that there is no “right thing to say.” There are probably wrong things to say, and I shall endeavor not to say those, but I think so many things can be right. So many versions of a sentence use different words, and each person might choose various phrases as being correct. Writing is expression, and all I can do is to convey to you, with the best of my ability, any thought in my head. I can doubt my ability.

Or I can believe in my damn self for once.

-Aether

If you enjoyed this post you may like my most recent post on feeling stuck. Or you may enjoy my most recent short story Shattered Skies.

I really appreciate all of my readers. Any of you who take time out of your busy days to read what I write are amazing. Every one of you is making my dream come true. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.