a voice.

on power (and celebrating six months on this app! 🎉).

A monument honoring Maya Angelou at the entrance to the Main Branch of the San Francisco Library, by artist Lava Thomas. Angelou is the first Black woman to be honored with a statue in the city.

CW: Sexual Violence.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou describes the onset of her childhood selective mutism in the aftermath of trauma. Little Marguerite (“Maya” was a nickname bestowed by her brother, Bailey, who called her “Mya Sister “) was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Freeman, when she was eight years old. He threatened to kill her beloved brother if she told anyone. But Little Marguerite told. She confided in Bailey, who then told their grandmother. Freeman was arrested, tried, and sentenced to one year and one day of prison, but his lawyer somehow got him released the day after the verdict. A few days later, he was found dead, apparently “kicked to death.” And Marguerite believed that Freeman had died because of the words she spoke. She decided then.

“I could feel the evilness flowing through my body and waiting, pent up, to rush off my tongue if I tried to open my mouth. I clamped my teeth shut. I’d hold it in. If it escaped, wouldn’t it flood the world and all the innocent people? […] The only thing I could do was to stop talking to people other than Bailey. Instinctively, or somehow, I knew that because I loved him so much I’d never hurt him, but if I talked to anyone else that person might die, too. Just my breath, carrying my words out, might poison people and they’d curl up and die like the black fat slugs that only pretended. I had to stop talking.”

Little Marguerite didn’t speak for almost five years because she thought her voice had the power to kill a man whose violence upon her body had nearly killed her.

I read Caged Bird for the first time in 8^th grade. I understood, on a level of which I was not yet safe to be fully aware, the root of Marguerite’s fear. The fear that speaking the truth about harm would lead to more of it. The fear that there was, therefore, something inherently harmful about my voice.

It was also in 8^th grade, not too long before reading Angelou, that my classmates and I watched a short documentary about sexual violence prevention in our humanities class. I recall no details about this film, only the way my heart raced and my fists clenched as the boys in my class snickered and joked throughout it.

Our teacher did her best. She posed a question to the room upon the film’s end.

“Why is it important for the boys in class to watch and pay attention to this? Why does it matter for everyone, not just the girls, to take this seriously?”

I raised my hand. I avoided eye contact with anyone but our teacher. I felt lava rising in my throat and steam emanating from my skin, but I did everything I could to keep my voice measured and steady as I spoke.

“If boys don’t pay attention to movies like this about what rape is and why it’s wrong, they might end up becoming rapists themselves.”

I was fully unprepared for what happened next. First one boy, then two, then a group of them. All raging at me.

“Are you calling us rapists? You just said that we’re gonna be rapists if we don’t watch this movie! Yeah you did, you said we’re all rapists!”

I ran out of the classroom crying. How horrible must my words have been for them to react that way? Maybe I was too emotional to make myself clear. Or maybe what I said was just wrong, regardless of how I said it. Maybe their anger was justified. Maybe my voice was violent.

I know why Marguerite went mute. And while I never experienced anything like her silence, I also never forgot how my own breath carrying my own words out could have consequences.

---

I struggle with knowing the appropriate level of volume to use when I speak. Sometimes I’m told that I’m too quiet when I feel like I’m screaming. Sometimes I’m told that I’m too loud when I feel like I’m whispering.

It can also be hard for me to know when to add my voice to a conversation. If I’m not concerned that I’m cutting people off to interject before I lose my thought, then I’m worried that I’m waiting so long to speak that the moment passes and the topic has shifted. How do I know the right moment to jump in? And, yes, in case you’re curious, I was also terrible at double dutch.

How it feels trying to enter a conversation sometimes.

I still don’t know what I sound like when I’m just…talking. Not trying my hardest to match what I understand to be the expectations of the environment and the interaction. All I know is that, somehow, the way my voice comes out never quite feels right.

I don’t mean to imply that I’ve never received positive feedback about my voice, because I have. Someone I dated when I was in my early twenties used to call me Sweet Voice. Former yoga students have told me that my voice was a warm companion as they relaxed into savasana. Friends have asked me when I’m going to start a podcast, convinced that mine is a voice people want in their earbuds.

It’s just that I’ve received a lot of negative feedback, too. Ex-partners have called me hysterical because I raised my voice in an argument. And family members have told me that I’m too soft and accommodating in moments of conflict. Former (white female) colleagues have cried because my tone was too aggressive in a meeting. And supervisors have told me that my affect is too sweet and girly to be taken seriously. Strangers have shot me dirty looks because I laughed too loudly with friends in cafes. And other strangers have looked at me like I’m an alien when I don’t laugh loudly enough in response to their small talk jokes.

All of this conflicting feedback left me in that familiar I’ll always be too much or not enough place when it came to when and where my voice entered.

In adulthood, I’ve told myself that I hold my voice back because of the part of me that doesn’t believe in it, doesn’t think it’s strong enough to be heard. That’s not untrue. A more complete truth recognizes the flip side of this coin. I’ve also held my voice back because of the part of me that fears it’s too strong. That part understands the effect I can have on people when I speak from a place of conviction, regardless of how hard I work to say it with clarity and calm. That part still fears that my speech will be perceived as an attack, whether I’m actually angry or not. One of my favorite astrologers, Wynter Taylor, helped me to articulate in a birth chart reading a few years ago that, when I speak, it can shatter the consensual, conventional reality that others hold. And when those shards pierce me, I’m right back in 8^th grade again.  

---

Sometimes I serve as a vessel to express things that people need to hear, in a way that they may not want to receive. I’m told then that my speech is poorly timed, too intense, or even harmful. I don’t ever want to wield my voice in a way that hurts anyone. I’ve often instead suppressed my voice in a way that hurts me. I’ve internalized other people’s discomfort with my speaking as evidence that what I have to say is better left unsaid.

My practice in recent years has been widening my own window of tolerance for discomfort, so that I can be okay even when I recognize that I’ve spoken in a way that lands awkwardly or makes others uncomfortable. I can now sit with my younger self - the one who ran out of that classroom, the one who identified with Marguerite - and let her know that her voice is not poison. That telling the truth about harm is not the same thing as harming someone. That just because her voice upset someone, it doesn’t mean that she hurt them.

There will be times when I’m understood and appreciated when I speak, and times when I’m not. Times when I say the wrong thing. Times when I say the right thing at the wrong time. I’m learning to accept that, when it comes to how I use my voice, I’ll always be learning.

---

Yesterday marked six months since I started posting on Substack (happy belated half Substack birthday to meee!). Writing in community with you all has been a practice in remembering how to trust myself with the power of my voice. A practice in honoring the fact that my voice can both soothe and singe, and trusting that I’ll know which is needed when. I'm remembering that a part of what I'm here to learn in this lifetime is how to trust myself with power. Not power over people, but power as in impact on my environment. Power as in an active choice to participate in the shaping of our shared reality.

I have a folder on my desktop full of screenshots of the kind words you’ve left for me in the comments sections of my essays. I force myself to read them as I prepare to write. It has honestly been overwhelming to have the power of my voice reflected back to me in a way that I can’t ignore yet don't quite know how to internalize. But I keep opening the folder, keep looking at my reflection. I’m grateful for your responses, because they serve as a reminder that my voice - even when it’s intense, even when it’s weird, even when it’s sharper or softer than some may prefer - is not wrong. That my authentic expression is a necessary offering toward building our collective power. An expression that is just as necessary as yours.

Marguerite began to speak again with the kind support of Mrs. Flowers, a townswoman who took an interest in her and encouraged her to start reading aloud. “Words mean more than what is set down on paper,” Mrs. Flowers told her. “It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”

Words do mean more than what is on paper. Or, what is on screen. Sharing my writing on this app has been a gentle entrance into offering my voice publicly, at the pace of what feels safe to my nervous system. Thanks to your support, my nervous system feels ready to kick it up a notch.

I’m planning to make use of the audio features on this app in the new year. Spirit has made it clear that there are people who would like to not just read my words, but also hear my voice. And, yes, it does feel a little bit scary. But I don’t think we have the luxury of allowing fear to justify our self-silencing anymore.

Thank you for reading. And for being there to listen when it’s time for me to speak.