Silent No More

As I sat across my friend at dinner last night, she couldn't wait to tell me that I was right. I had called it. A situation involving a mutual friend of ours had went exactly as I predicted. It wasn't that I was being a know-it-all, I simply could see what was going to happen months earlier and it did. An idea so reprehensible to her that she poo pooed my "knowing" immediately.

I was not offended at her response months earlier. I never felt I had anything to prove. I was so confident because I could see the outcome playing out in my mind like a movie and I voiced it.

That was the exact affirmation I needed after a rough week of reliving past offenses over and over. Trying to sort out details and defend my young voice that once spoke up and was gagged. After days of tension, tears, and self reflection I found the piece of me that was missing. My voice. As a writer, if you don't have truth about who you are and your voice it's ALL make believe and soulless. May as well be the AI devil (as known to creative writers) developing your story without a lick of humanity embedded in it.

Listening to intelligent writers on a regular basis, I know that it's my voice in my writing that connects to the reader. Writers insert themselves into their characters, sometimes knowingly sometimes not. Welp, this little revelation that I have a voice and it's been stifled by lies my entire life opened up something in me. A calling.

It's always been there since I was a little, loved, fireball of a girl. As a four-year-old, my mom said I would boldly stand on a chair and sing in front of the whole church. And I wouldn't miss a beat. Because I loved music and the POWER of words...voice.

Now that I'm all grown up it's time to get about it again. Whether it will be through the written word or speaking one on one to the hurting my time has come and I will be silenced no more.

Me and my beloved grandpa, Lyndell, posing while visiting Florida.