Rescuing Your Voice

[The Creative Call – XI]

I’m not sure we hear ourselves anymore.

Input comes from everywhere. On the surface, I mean the stimuli of media is so all-consuming that there simply is no room left. We all have a limit on our intake of sounds, ideas, images, breaking news stories, and friends’ updates. No one can drink all the water that comes out of a firehose. Our own voice drowns.

On a deeper note, I mean that our creative engine—our True Self—that thrives on finding solutions, encountering beauty, playing with ideas, and making things hides when threatened. There are many ways we protect ourselves from the risk. One of the first is to hide our uniqueness. This is a survival technique. Our creativity inherently differentiates us and is easily targeted. So we silence it.

I once heard a writing teacher say, “If you get stuck, stop reading.” That seems counterintuitive. Doesn’t reading inspire writing? Yes, but reading too much can also be threatening to the source of ideas. Other's output, whether it's brilliant literature or hundreds of Instagram posts, is intimidating. Over time it can be silencing. She said, “At some point, you begin to confuse the author’s ideas with your own, and then you’ve sacrificed your voice on the alter of being well read.”

Too much stimulus can numb creative energy and deaden the flow of ideas. Sometimes not reading jumpstarts writing. Ideas emerge; new thoughts come from nowhere.

Stop consuming.

The threat on your unique perspective will disappear. Your creativity will thank you. Your voice will emerge.