Voice

I started this site when I was in grad school as a semester-long project in learning to code HTML. I kept it, initially, because I was job searching and needed somewhere to showcase project work and also to create a separation between my future career and my current job and social media. I also wanted a little piece of the internet to myself.

It’s been been ten years now and I still haven’t done much with it. I’ve had plans for board game review pages, data management annotated bibliographies, creative projects, all of which languish as random pages mostly unpublished.

Some of this is because I feel that I’ve lost my voice. Some of this is because I’ve been convinced that my voice isn’t worth listening too. (Haven’t we heard enough from cis-het white women – and in some cases too much)? I don’t feel that I have anything to contribute.

I’m not going to get into the aspect of worthiness. That’s for my therapist. But I can address my voice. I used to be an active blogger in the pre-Facebook days of WordPress, Xanga and others. I found it easy to express myself and didn’t much concern myself with the quality or quantity of “content.” My life, which I mostly wrote about, wasn’t more or less interesting than it is now.

What I think has happened is that I became unable to hear myself think. The deluge of professional work has funneled me into a certain type of voice and only concerning a narrow topic scope. Easy, low-value content such as TV, music, and social media is astonishingly accessible and fills every chink in my day. Family and friend obligations have not stopped, even with the pandemic. They have only changed format and frequency.

On some level I realized this was a problem because I finally recognized burnout. There wasn’t any area of my life that I didn’t fill to beyond overflowing. It was 100% all the time in all areas. I have made room for more creative work, but while I’m doing that I’m listening to a podcast. Through all my professional work I have background audio through MyNoise. On the train I’m doing French lessons, guided meditations, or listening to music. Downtime just about anywhere is a quick trip to YouTube. At home the TV, streaming platforms, or YouTube is always on and, at the end of the day when it is finally quiet, I’ll read. There are none of my own thoughts in any of this.

Therapy helped me rebalance personal and professional work (disclaimer: still a major work in progress). But, I hadn’t realized that I still had a pervasive problem until I tried to finish my most recent paper. I have been struggling with it more than I’m used to. I can’t get my brain to synthesize information. I know now it’s because I don’t give it any room to think.

It’s no wonder that I have no voice. It’s atrophied. I’ve been listening to everyone else’s.

So, this is my reminder to myself to do nothing – truly nothing – and try to hear myself.