I lost my voice many years ago. Not the voice I used in talking to people, but my inner voice. The instinctive one that directs me on what to say or do. I lost it.
I lost my inner voice from ceaseless traumas from my childhood — starting from when I was bullied in high school, to being heavily criticized by my family on countless occasions, sexual assault, down to further delays and struggles from trying to meet up with my education, career, and relationships — due to or maybe not, from these traumas.
But the major causal factor for me was not having a nurturing environment to accommodate all the after-effects of what I was going through. As such, it was a constant warzone filled with shouts, noise, and criticisms to scale through to be where I am and who I am now.
I took it all, but lost something as vital as my voice. My intuition, my inner child as well.
I stopped being myself and started liking what others liked and hated what they hate. I followed steps others laid for me without truly understanding what was there for me.
I guess I gave up on humanity, to say the least without realizing it. I was floating.
Slowly, now more than ever, I’ve begun healing. At least for the past two years. Ever since I stumbled on medium.com and started reinforcing all the innate traits I had in me such as reading and writing which I suppressed.
This platform and avenue opened my heart and mind to all I’ve missed about my life and since then I never looked back. I’ve progressively and aggressively become better in many sectors of my life.
But just like an injury, the loss of my voice has left many scars to show what I’ve been through. And I hope that if it’s your case now, that you can recognize it and like me, stop whatever you’re doing and go on a self-discovery quest.
Here are some of the dents and marks it left:
Communication is hard
The first obvious scar or sign of one who’s lost their voice is being mute. But in my case, I could not communicate and effectively so. Of course I could talk, but it took me only but a few weeks ago to learn how to communicate compared to twenty-something years of my life before then.
By not communicating I mean not being able to fully construct a sentence that came directly from my heart without any inputs biases or intrusions from others’ beliefs and opinions.
I wasn’t myself up to the point that everything I said was borrowed. In other words, I couldn’t use my brain.
Use of words
Communicating ineffectively also meant not knowing how to use certain words freely. If you grew up in an extremely strict environment as I did, and you are a first-born for that matter, then you’d know how excruciatingly difficult it is to be yourself not to talk of using some words to express yourself. It could be curse words when you’re mad or glorifying words when you are joyful. But constantly you’re sieving what words to use to qualify how you feel. Which is strenuous, to say the least.
Confusion
I was in constant battle with myself. My inner self was in a state of pandemonium all the time. I was fighting myself, fighting others who couldn’t help me (although I didn’t even know I needed help), and fighting everything that came my way — good or bad. It was as if I was dimming the voice in my head and the light in my life and choosing darkness to loom.
I couldn’t just be.
Being
One of the major traits of a traumatized kid is being. You can’t intentionally be anything you slate. Yes, we have dreams and goals we slate to fulfill but we never seem to know how to actualize them. We’re constantly preoccupied with life happening to us- (or like Oprah Winfrey rightly put, for us) daily to figure it out. Add that to a cold environment where you ought to receive first-class love, and you’ll be in total shambles all the time.
So, losing your voice means you can be anything because you have no sense of direction.
Voidness
You feel empty all the time when you lose your voice. You equally feel powerless about it too. This transcends to other areas of your life such as and mainly your relationships. You can’t seem to make headway with the people in your life and when you manage to engage in one, you’re constantly looking for them to fill you up. Because you are hollow like that. Hence missing out on the scheme of the relationship, which is two whole human beings coming together to make it work.
Another area this loss of voice mostly affects is your career choices. You can’t seem to make headway if you’re lucky to come that far. You swing your head and eyes to wherever others said you should be, for example, where they pay higher, where you can receive higher bonuses, the fancy job titles. Never where your spirit nor heart wants you to be or wants you to do — because you lost that ability. And as a result, you’re aloof, if or when eventually you find something going for you.
Since trauma snatched away your voice, it means that you have little control on how to recover it. Therefore there is no tell-tale approach on how to recover the voice you lost other than the combinations of having the rightest people in your life, true love, light, God, and luck to course-correct.
These occurrences or placements in your life will trigger a sense of self-awareness in you which would kick-start the healing and full self-discovery journey.
As for me, I was lucky. More so prayerful enough to discern it was God when a former colleague of mine (while in a job I hated) introduced me to this platform just by hearing that I loved writing, and it has dramatically changed my life ever since then constantly.
The point is; so long as you continue with the strive to be better than where you are, your voice will be found, you will be found as well.
Losing one’s voice sucks. But most times, it’s not what we choose for them to happen to us. So when you find yourself in such a predicament or know someone who’s in it, exercise some empathy or compassion for the person. You have to acknowledge that they aren’t headless chickens in totality. Nobody is. Life happened.
It will take the same love lost to replace the voice lost.
It’s a matter of having the right people in the right place to slowly bring us back to where we need to be. And have our voice back!
Be that person.
