How I found my voice and (try to) hold on to it

A voice is not something that rolls out of the pocket and drops on the road. It does not get misplaced inside cupboards, though it might get lost in a crowd. It can’t be snatched, but it can get stolen, and one will find it tough to locate the thief.

We are all born with a voice, but some of us spend a lifetime trying to find it. It gets buried in the rearing of a child, drowned in loud company of friends, bound by the rules of work and suffocated by the constructs of society. It requires a special kind of eye to find a lost voice and a special kind of ear to hear it. 

I had never given much thought to my voice.

I had been a quiet kid, a quiet preteen and a quieter teenager. This was certified by my school report cards that had remarks by teachers that stated ‘she is a quiet child’. It was a relief for them, a monkey less to tame. It was pride for my parents as I stood behind them in social gatherings, nodding at most, mumbling one word replies if coaxed. ‘Such quiet, well behaved children,’ the response would come and be taken as a compliment. I had few opinions and little reason to voice them, unless they were rehearsed and prepared for a debate or elocution competition, in which case I would speak confidently on stage. There was little relation between the confidence required to speak on stage and the one needed to confront a friend, I would later realize. A recital inevitably followed adult approval, a prerequisite before I was able to express myself, real life came with no such test checks.

There was also a dissonance between my dreams of making it big and my inability to state them. I naively believed that ‘letting your actions speak’ meant that any other kind of assertion of self was unnecessary and practically inappropriate. Speaking only when spoken to was the mantra in practice. That I grew up in a convent school where silence was precious added to my strengths.

It was only when I joined an engineering college that I saw space for noise, an endless vacuum to absorb sounds of all kinds. It seemed acceptable to shout, scream, yell. No one would blink an eye. A brashness and crudeness of language exuded inside and outside class. There were debates, the substance of which was often flimsy, but students had opinions, about national politics and the state of the world, and these were declared with a confidence that didn’t bely knowledge. 

These opinions sprung from the canteen and spread their tentacles to the then default social media- Facebook. Comment wars became a thing and so did spending hours displaying and defending allegiances from friends and family. A part of me found ease in communication and expression through the written word. It removed the fear in the moment of directly witnessing the response of the person whose opinion I was differing from. But even there a form of self censorship continued, enhanced by the fear that too many people were watching  and heightened by a form of impostor syndrome. Clearly none of us teenagers were experts on the next general elections, but why was I the one holding my ill formed opinion back? 

The contrast between how men and women expressed themselves was clearly reflected during those years. In an all-girls school, I was silent around young girls. In college, I was silenced by the volume of boys, their overconfidence, their overstated presence. Perhaps it was their abundance (they outnumbered the girls eight times) that added to this lopsided equation, or my ignorance of the ways in which patriarchy had cradled them into believing their invincibility. 

The effects were momentous. I started using a language that had never been mine, one whose already light contours had been softened to blend into every shade, eager to fit into the cool girl prototypes. I started keeping a company that wasn’t me, accepting, even in jest, a treatment aimed to maintain the status quo. I looked at women who asserted themselves with fear and bewilderment. I fell headfirst into the trope that boys made better friends, and in the guise of a new found independence, started shedding everything that had been me. Opinions when stated repeatedly, loudly began to feel like the truth. By the end, if they said that the sun rose from the west, I would believe it. 

It took some time and a lot of space before I started making sense of my ordeal and could see that things had gotten worse. I no longer fit in my own humble definition of self. With this realization, I felt an urgent need of an outlet, a medium to tell my truth, as if my existence was real in only the expression of it, as if all of living had no meaning if I wasn’t able to stake claim on it, to own it, by voicing it. I realized I had lost whatever little voice I had and I needed it back. At this point, I found an unlikely medium in an old defunct twitter account.

Barely anyone I knew was following me on that account, so there was no fear of judgement. Strangers or trolls didn’t perturb me; the fact that it was public gave me a rush; that I was speaking into a void didn’t hamper me. I started posting unfiltered thoughts, giving myself the permission to not require anyone’s approval. I curated my feed to my interests- geopolitics, fiction, cinema, history, anything. Every time I saw a policy wonk post a link to his op-ed I had read, I asked a question. Every time I loved a book I’d read, I told the author. I spoke openly, kindly to complete strangers. It felt much easier to talk to people with shared beliefs online, than it ever had been in the real world. This online version of me was a new version of myself, like a self invented when moving to a new school or a new city with no previous ties. But could an invented voice be real?  Could a 140-character voice translate into the real world?

A voice did flow from the keyboard through my fingers and somehow found its way to my throat. The period coincided with me moving to a new city in a professional training phase- a bridge between the student life and the real world- the perfect setup to test my newly constructed online self outside of it. I began by asking more questions, raising my hand in every training session to clarify my doubts, to improve my understanding, but really just to converse loudly and clearly with an expert in front of hundreds of others and hear my own self. Some heads would turn, perhaps some eyes would roll, but soon I presume it became accepted. I was unhindered by my previous self image, only driven to overturn it, and they accepted what I showed them. I felt the strange exhilaration people feel when they hear their recorded voice- is this how I produce vibrations, is this how the air carries it, is this how I sound to another ear? Men listening to me bewildered me (were they really interested in my thoughts?) and I kept waiting for a man to tell me the earth was flat to break the spell. It never happened. My gendered view of the people around me became more and more nuanced.

Around the same time I began writing my truth- initially in snippets on social media and gradually in fully formed essays and articles. I would write what I could yet not speak- my experiences, my learnings, the contradictions I saw and tried to make sense of. Though the words occupied the same space in my mind, my stomach felt lighter, fresher when I wrote- it was all out in the open, permanently, for everyone to see. There was no going back once something was written and printed. The intimacy of the writing experience comforted me, the finality of its publication boosted my confidence. And I found the most beautiful joy in other small voices saying, ‘yes, this is my truth too.’

Yet I realized that the muscles in my fingers and the throat could become sharper with practice but would rust and crumble if not used enough. There was a constant fear that this was just a show that would end once the curtains were drawn. Like a theatre artist I had to be in character always, practising by being. To speak up had to become a matter of habit lest I fell back into the safe, familiar territory of silence. 

It was difficult, I would realize, to speak up around people who were not used to hearing me answer back. It came at the cost of long established peace. There was a further need to constantly weigh and filter words, like chaff from grain, to see if they were coming from a need to express or just pent up rage. Does every voice in the head need to be spoken aloud, or is being mindful of the listening ear’s propensity to accept an equally important ingredient of a thinking voice? I would come into conflict with the version of myself I had worked so hard to achieve. Keeping quiet, reining the irritation or anger in, then felt like a betrayal of self. The new found voice was needing strength in just holding on to it. It was prone to slipping away. 

A new found voice also played hide and seek, hiding just when it was needed. It disappeared during moments of fights and confrontations, when accusations were shot like arrows and I needed to decide whether to shoot some of my own or hold hands high as a sign of defeat. The voice left the throat dry when faced with an uncomfortable truth. The voice betrayed me when I felt unsafe in the presence of strange men, and dug deep into my mountain of confidence to shout, complain, but found nothing but nervous silence. The voice had a life of its own, I only had an illusion of control over it.

An illusion of control, however, was a boon. The control on my voice boosted my self worth, the knowledge of its elusive nature made me empathetic. It made me realiez that if my voice was differing from my thoughts, those speaking to me must also be filtering. If all of us faced this dichotomy, it was important to minimize this difference between our inner and outer selves, to ease the struggle. The least we could do was to listen to what we would merely hear, silently, to make the other voice feel seen and not just heard; to not assume when we could ask, to not believe when we could confirm. I realized that all of us feel real only through our expression of self, and once we express we crave acceptance. Finding a voice had little meaning without finding a listening ear.

A voice was not a voice in isolation, it was merely an echo. It takes one to find a voice, I know now, and two to hold on to it.