confidence

do you believe in the value of your own voice?

MM: I decently despise when writers write about writing, but this topic has been on my mind so much lately that I’m making an exception to my rule of not doing it :)

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I’ve never been good at closing sentences, last paragraphs, or finishing things perfectly. I find conclusions hard to draw because they’re so subjective. Is it really my place to tell you what you got out of my words? What if, god forbid, I draw a different conclusion than you and it jolts you out of the reverie that both of our brains work the same way?

I know, meta meta meta. These are the kinds of thoughts it’s crucial to extract from my head so I can start to see them objectively — and also why I like texting friends all the time. I find it extremely helpful to take notes on my thought patterns in whatever text box, notebook, or messaging app is closest. Texting is particularly great because it’s continuous, ever-evolving, and the exact opposite of an essay ending. Each concise little text bubble is an opportunity to shift, interrupt, and recalibrate how meta my thinking is, given a little help from people who love me.

Despite feeling uncertain about the value of my voice, I still love to document the human experience in my own words — chasing a certain mental and emotional granularity that I find great satisfaction pinning down.¹ Patricia Lockwood: “Being a writer meant my voice was in a different place. There was no rhyme or reason as to why I could make this sound and not the other. Always I felt that I was writing to the tune of some music that I learned very early and did not quite remember.”

The downside of doing a lot of this first-person narration is that it gave me a false sense that there’s shame in changing — that I’d be breaking a promise to people who think highly of me under specific conditions and in certain contexts. The clearest sign that I had fallen into the trap of thinking of myself as a brand was how concerned I had become about even slightly shifting my ambitions/interests/personality. Joan Didion: “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

My excuse for not writing was always that I didn’t have anything to say. I’ve since realized that was cope. I was just uncomfortable being bad at it and kept getting tripped up tip-toeing around thoughts and feelings that I didn’t feel like I was allowed to have. I chose to be ““private”” because I was ashamed of myself and didn’t think I was worth listening to.

Feeling like you’re worth listening to is a byproduct of making hard decisions and teasing out of them cohesive and convincing personal stories that help you make sense of the world. It’s also born from knowing that you can both stick with things and quit when you realize they’re wrong — giving a person a quietly steely quality that’s often described as “resiliency.” Resilient people know how to think on long timescales and make risky short-term bets, frequently citing having “just known” what the right decision was. Building the capacity to “just know” requires sitting in the unknown for uncomfortably long periods of time — at least, it feels that way at the start. Big reality shifts become more appealing as each bite (“What if what I’m trying to convince myself of isn’t true?”) reveals the benefits of having an appetite for risk (receiving a mouthful of something better than you could have ever imagined).

I blew up my life several times this past year: first by transplanting myself into a foreign environment and second, by abandoning that reinvention to return to the people and places that have always felt like home. It granted me plenty of moments of mental freefall (h/t Fouad): I first thought freedom was everything, then I thought it was nothing, now I’m not quite sure what to think — but I do know that I’ve proven to myself that I no longer need anyone’s permission, validation, nor to make myself very small in exchange for love with contingency clauses. I still worry that I don’t know how to consistently see others as anything more than supporting characters or antagonists, but that doesn’t discredit the fact that some people will never love me as I like no matter how hard I try to teach them.

The past month I’ve been hearing my own voice far more clearly. She’s louder than I remember. More jaded but also wiser, less willing to adopt the narratives of others. She knows what she wants: to grow up with you, dear reader, to relish in defining our shared compounding context, and for love to never be a consolation and instead, be light. Which requires we both believe in our own lights to begin with (I’m working on it). I’ve become far less willing to sacrifice my needs; in this new environment of my making, feeling listened to and seen by people that really, truly love me is merely the baseline.

I have no perfect conclusion or closing sentence. All I have is a commitment to make the most of my 22-year-won freedom: I will talk more, be wrong more, and feel less ashamed about it. I will endeavor to see beyond myself, chase moments of mental freefall, and unabashedly document the full spectrum of this here human’s experience. I will write this story precisely as I see it, even if that means losing you in the process. Franz Kafka: “I must stop, the end of the page comes as a warning that it might get too wild.”

1. Yes, many have asked me “If you’re so hung up on the value of your voice, why don’t you just pick a different topic?” which is great advice except I see basically no point in doing things that I couldn’t uniquely do and that mentality extends to writing too. I already had two pieces of the puzzle (a strong sense of what “me” sounds like and an innate interest in how human beings work), I was just missing the final piece (actually valuing my own perspective).