Exercise my voice

I honestly feel like I lost my voice.  Somewhere along the way to becoming who I am today I lost the ability to express myself. I don’t mean this in day-to-day terms – thankfully I can still order a flat white, tell my kids I love them, facilitate a workshop session and maintain a few special friendships. What I mean relates to expressing my emotions, ideals and opinions. I confess, I am a little tempted to blame someone (one person in particular or at least some experiences we shared) but alas - assigning blame is is not healthy and totally pointless on any practical level. Let's just say how it happened is far less significant than that it happened. So anyway.

What happens is that when I go to express my opinion – (and this is aside from the very demure you’re not smart / educated / good enough to have your own opinion which has followed me from youth) is that my mind immediately moves to consider any other possible argument / angle it can think of to trap me up. And this continues until I am resigned to the fact that there is no greater value in any of the positions thats worth defending.

I’ve been told that the why mechanics of this self expressionless-ness could have to do with lack of confidence, underlying fears (maybe of failure or ignorance), blocked creativity, knowledge deficit, even laziness or just plain old i-don’t-give-a-shit-ness. At this point I have no idea. All I know is that there is nothing less conversationally interesting than total nuetrality!

This blog is a project of self-expression - exercise for my voice.

And every time I feel vulnerable I will watch Brene Brown’s wonderful TED talk on the power of vulnerability: