Finding Your Voice

 

“In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.”

—John Grisham

I love Goodreads daily quotes because every time I find something that speaks to me directly, saying things I so need to hear right now. The quote about finding your voice, obvious as it might seem at first glance, led to the light bulb moment. Yes, I've been searching for my true identity, shedding off layers I've acquired in the years when I did nothing but tried to fit in. Even if at the cost of losing myself. And lately I've been struggling to regain everything I've so recklessly given away. It hasn't been easy - mostly it's two steps forward, one step back. My inclination to speak up my mind occasionally gets pushed back by the old habit to please and say what others want to hear. I vowed not to participate in gossips but can't help my curiosity, when someone suggests "Guess what..." But at least I started moving in the right direction, even if taking baby steps.

Finding my voice is similar to that process but it's also different. When you speak in your own voice, the sound vibrates with positive energy and you feel it flow through your whole body. Your voice has the power to always find the right things to say by expertly digging them out from the complex, entangled maze of your thoughts. But the voice knows, the kind of knowing that leaves no room for doubt, the absolute knowledge of "that is so".

It can be tempting to suppress your true voice because what it says isn't always to everyone's liking. And it calls out to suppressed true voices of those around you. Some of them will respond with gratitude, others will hide their voice even deeper, unwilling to mess with something as powerful as that, a threat to their comfort. But I want to have the courage to stick with my true voice, because what it brings to the world is compassion, wisdom, light and peace. I want to speak with the voice that soothes, heals and shows the way.

Hitting the Wall

So, what's new... I feel like I've made a full circle yet again and came back to where I started. You live with one way of thinking, your peculiar perception system, and then as you get exposed to something new that truly speaks to you, you leave your old beliefs to follow the new path. And as it unravels, as you nod in agreement - "yes, yes, yes!" - the world amazes you with wonders you haven't noticed before. Even though they lay there in plain sight all along. But as you go deeper and deeper into this new knowledge, it gets too condensed, too artificially-sweetened, until you reach the point of paradox, where one obvious contradiction negates the whole approach and everything you've been accepting as real. You are back to square one, too disappointed to bring from the journey those couple of points that weren't that bad. It's like reading a book with a stellar beginning that soon turns into trivial, amateurish writing with a predictable end. Screw the beginning and its alluring promise of great things - it's a one-star read, period.

So here's how it goes with me every time I stumble upon an ultra-new, fail-proof shortcut to happiness. First I get all excited and hopeful, abandon all my old beliefs in favor of these newly found wisdoms, experiment daily, eagerly awaiting the awesomely positive results. And then I see how little if nothing changes. Or that this new system skips important concepts if it's unable to bend them to their otherwise universal rules. I feel disappointed, annoyed, mislead, fooled. It's like you were given wings and you are enjoying flying for the first time until the moment you realize the wings are just imaginary, and you are high above the ground and nothing is going to hold you, so the only way for you is to go down with the gravity pull, back to where you were in your pre-wing life.

It doesn't mean that I won't keep reading, and pondering, and trying out new ideas. It's just that maybe everything is true and nothing is true, so in the end it doesn't matter what you are thinking, or doing. You will still keep going and it doesn't matter which religion or belief-system support each of the steps you make. You are getting somewhere and there's no way to say if you are in the right spot, of if there's such a thing as the right spot.

So, another day, and I may choose to be active and submerge in the pool of activities, busy myself with life-changing acts or curl up with an entertaining book and do nothing else but read. It's just another day and it's been lived.