I didn’t lose my voice all at once.
It was slower than that, like erosion, not collapse. I kept writing. I stayed productive. I was in the right rooms, doing the right things. But gradually, the writing stopped sounding like someone I knew.
It wasn’t that the writing was bad. Sometimes it was even praised. But it felt thinner somehow, with more effort and less urgency. I found myself shaping the work around what might be received instead of what needed to be said. And as my voice faded, so did something else: the inspiration that once moved through me without force.
The sentences still came, but with less conviction. I could sense the outline of what I wanted to write, but not the heartbeat. It was like tracing over something that used to be alive.
At some point, I realized I was showing up to the page trying to get it done instead of trying to get it true.
This series, What Wants to Be Said, is my return to that truth. Not to explain or perfect it. Just to sit with it. To write for myself first and let that be enough.
These posts are not essays. They’re not instructions. They’re a practice—short meditations on writing, grief, memory, and voice. I’m not trying to create something perfect here. I’m tending to what overflows.
Each week, I’ll write something that feels like a check-in with that deeper part of myself. Some of it may eventually shape the memoir I’m still working on. Some of it may remain as its own quiet form of truth-telling.
Either way, I want to start here:
I haven’t stopped writing.
But I’ve finally started to sound like myself again.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next Monday.
