I used to think I didn’t deserve to speak up until I had something smart or insightful to say. Now I know that,
if I can speak up in humility, even when my thoughts are incomplete, my words help shape who we are together
becoming.
There has been a pattern in my life of keeping silent. I thought silence was saving all of us, but of course it wasn’t. Silence didn’t save anything.
My husband has been trying to lose weight lately. It’s not a re-ally aggressive approach. He’s not dieting, per se. It’s more lifestyle changes. He’s trying to eat smaller quantities and avoid ordering pizza late at night and, you know, stop before he eats the entire box of cookies. Pretty typical first world, stressed-out, slowing metabolism-because-I’m-30-now type problems.
The cool thing is he’s seeing results. He bought a scale and put it in our bathroom and he weighs himself several times a week. His clothes are fitting better. He has more energy. It’s an all-around good thing.
The problem is, for me, scales and diets and counting
calo-ries are not a good thing. Not even close. I’m 5’10” and 128 pounds (I know because I just weighed myself) and I don’t need to lose weight. But for some strange reason, when people around me are dieting, I can’t help but join in. I’m not sure if its the competitive nature in me, or if it’s all the magazines and media that have fried my brain into thinking “the thinner, the better!” or if it’s some other kind of quirk or sickness altogether, but every time I hear him celebrate that he’s lost a pound or four pounds or that he only ate a certain number of calories for dinner... I can’t help but feel badly about the number of calories I ate for dinner, or rush to the scale to weigh myself to compare.
For the first several weeks he was doing this, I didn’t tell him. I worried that, if I told him, I would squelch his energy and enthusi-asm toward eating better and working out and I really didn’t want to do that. I was happy about the changes he was making. I didn’t want him to stop. So why would I tell him something that was go-ing to make him feel badly about it?
Here’s why. Because when we choose not to speak up about things, our words become toxic inside of us.
According to Miriam Greenspan, when we “suppress, dispel, avoid, deny analyze or distract” ourselves from what we think or feel—rather than being mindful of it—the energy of those thoughts and feelings either gets trapped inside of us as toxic en-ergy, or it finds a means to escape some other way. She goes on to say:
“Distract yourself from deep sorrow and it will come back to haunt you. While distraction can stave off feeling overwhelmed by intense emotional energy, it can also suppress a necessary flow of emotion... distracting ourselves from our emotional pain...
doesn’t help us get to the root of what ails us.”
Speaking up, on the other hand, will get us to the root of what
ails us. Speaking up about what we want, feel or need is terrifying because it exposes our weakness and gives others the opportunity to really hurt us. But it is the only way out I’ve found out of the dark woods of silence.
Say What You Need To Say
I guess the first thing that drew me to writing and blogging was the thought that people would actually listen to me. I always felt invisible in my real life—like I had a hundred things to say but that nobody really wanted me to say them. Or, more accurately, that I just didn’t have the courage to speak up. So I was shocked when I discovered there was a way I could lock myself in my bed-room, where I felt safe, say the things I wanted to say, and then just allow people to come read as they so desired. I was even more shocked to discover people would actually come. And comment.
And share with their friends.
So the start of my career as a writer was really 100% selfish, if I’m being honest. It was all about me. I didn’t care about a reader, wasn’t even thinking about an audience. All I was concerned about was saying the things I wanted and needed to say.
This isn’t all a bad thing. In fact, I think this is all part of the process. I don’t know if there is a way to get to selflessness without first being selfish. Think of babies. They come out screaming and crying for what they need, the center of their own little universe.
Eventually, they grow into people who hopefully learn to empa-thize with others, to reach out, to see the impact they’re having on the world as a whole. But that’s not the way they start. That’s where they’re headed. And the screaming-crying, all-about-me stage is all part of the process.
But at the same time, the more attuned we can be to our own
process, the more intentional we can be about it, the more likely we are to reach a level of maturity as people and as writers. This process, in my experience, goes in order. It had a cyclical nature to it. It repeats itself over and over and over again.
We learn to be present with ourselves, to listen to what our bodies are saying (not necessarily our minds), we are willing to wrestle with it, to see it as imperfect, to let go of control, and then we are ready to put it out into the world. So often we get this back-wards. We speak up before we’ve done the work that comes before-hand—not the work of perfecting, but the work of surrendering.
Showing up. Listening. Fighting through it all.
Those who have walked this journey know: this is where our message comes from. This is how we know what we need to say.
If we want to experience the intrinsic benefits of writing I’m talking about, if we want our words to really make a difference in our own lives or the lives of those around us, we can’t ignore the steps that come before speaking up—being present, listening to ourselves, wrestling through a problem, learning to see it as nu-anced, and letting go of control. This process readies us for what comes when we speak our minds.
It readies us to receive criticism with wisdom and grace. It readies us to admit our own part in all of this—our anger, our grief, our fear. It readies us to get into the ring, to be a part of our own messy story.
It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process. But the process is worth it. I’ve seen this to be true over and over again.
Owning Our Stories
After a week or so of stopping myself and feeling scared by what my husband might say, I finally decided to speak up. I had
spent a lot of time, privately, working through my fear, so when I finally talked to him it wouldn’t seem like I was asking him to hold it. I was present with myself, and listened, and felt humbled by my own part in this—the lack of control I felt over this area of my life.
But I also let go of control and gave myself permission to be imper-fect.
After all of that, I finally felt ready to speak up.
I prefaced the conversation by saying I wasn’t asking him to change what he was doing, but that I wanted him to know what was going on with me. I told him I still wasn’t sure where these feelings were coming from, but that every time he shared his weight loss victories with me, I felt an ache inside. I told him how I had been weighing myself at night and in the morning, right along with him, and counting calories like he had.
I admitted how crazy this was—I really don’t have weight to lose—but that it was easy to make it an obsession.
And the moment I finished telling him the story, I felt some-thing shift. I don’t want to oversimplify and say, “all I had to do was say it out loud and everything changed!” But the truth is when I spoke up about what I was feeling, there was a tangible shift in my personal energy. I gained a little bit more confidence in that mo-ment, a little accountability, a little dignity from telling my story.
I became a little bit more myself.
The best part of all of it is my husband didn’t react like I feared he would. Part of this is how I presented the information to him:
my tone wasn’t blaming or angry. I reminded him several times that I wasn’t asking him to change. I shared vulnerably about my hurt and my fear. And his response was really positive. It wasn’t defensiveness. It wasn’t a desperate need to “fix” the problem—by giving up the weight loss process himself. Instead, it was a tender understanding of who I was and what I felt.
It wasn’t because he saw me that I became myself in that mo-ment. It was because I became myself that he could see me. And being seen felt really good.
We think we can protect people if we don’t speak up. Or at least this is what so often keeps me silent. I think I can protect myself from the pain of ridicule when I have an idea that doesn’t work, or that I can protect others from the pain of discovering the impact of their words or actions. I buy into the lie that ignorance is bliss and would rather live in that ignorance than invite any of us out into the light.
But ignorance is never as blissful as it seems, and keeping quiet might protect us from blame or ridicule, but it also keeps us trapped in our own miserable prison of silence.
And yet speaking up is not always glamorous. When we de-cide to speak up, we are choosing to join the ring, to get into the mess of things. When we choose to speak up, we’re choosing to throw our weight around a little, to stick our elbows out and make room for ourselves. This means we have skin in the game. We can’t speak up without having any skin in the game.
Speaking up means we might be wrong.
It means we might be right, but we might have said it in the wrong way.
It means admitting we only know part of the story.
When we speak up, we are inviting criticism. We can’t speak up without expecting people are going to respond—and they get to choose how they do that.
We have to ask ourselves: Are we ready? Are we strong enough?
What if my husband had responded to me with anger or criticism or frustration or fear of his own? That would be his choice. Could I have held onto myself anyway? Could I have held my story and let him hold his? When we throw our voices into the silence, we have
to know our voices won’t be the only ones there. The world is filled with voices. Is there room enough for all of us?
Can we hold onto our own story, in spite of everyone else?
I think we can. I believe we can. But not without being ready.
Not until we’ve learned to show up, to listen to ourselves, to wres-tle through problems, to be willing to be imperfect. Not until we learn to let go of control.
Something profound is happening to me as I’m learning to own my own story without asking others to own it for me. I’m discovering I’m stronger and more unique than I ever imagined.
I’m discovering there is room for me. I’m beginning to see how my thoughts and ideas and opinions aren’t nearly as important to the world as my voice is—the words and images and stories that make up who I am.
Something To Try: Tell The Story Of Your Opin-ion
I was editing a short eBook by one of my clients and there was one particular part I found to be really off-putting. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but as I read the words I just felt disconnected from the author, like there was a thickness between him and me.
It could have been the subject matter, I told myself, since I hap-pened to disagree with what he was saying, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. I often read articles I disagree with but can still ad-mit they are well-written. It was something else.
So I asked the author if he could meet with me over the phone or Skype and I told him what I was sensing. I tried to be sensitive to the fact that I disagreed with what he was saying and reiterated several times that I wasn’t trying to get him to change his mind. I just wanted him to “show up” for the reader.
Then I had an idea.
I asked him to tell me the story of this opinion. He looked at my blankly. “This seems like something really personal to you,”
I said. “You feel really passionately about it, I can tell. Where did that start? How does this issue impact you personally?”
When I asked that, he squirmed a little and looked away from the camera.
“You don’t have to tell me what just happened right there,” I said. “But whatever it was, write that.” I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by forcing him to process with me right then and there, but I asked him if he felt like he could stay present with that feeling, as uncomfortable as it was. I asked him if he could listen to what the feeling was telling him, if he could wrestle with it a little, if he could give himself permission to be a mix of both good and bad, and if he could let go of control for long enough to get it on paper.
“I’ll try,” he said.
“That’s all you can do,” I told him.
When he sent the revisions to me, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was like a different writer had written the same sec-tion. Suddenly, the parts which had seemed so off-putting to me before were the exact parts that invited me into his story. The part that had made me feel he was putting himself above me—“I have it figured out and someday you can have it figured out too”—was the part that now made me feel like we were connected in some inex-plicable way. It was the part that made me feel a little less lonely, a little more confident.
It was the part that made me want to keep showing up for my-self, listening, learning to wrestle, admitting my own shortcom-ings and letting go of control so I could speak my own story as well.
His voice came through so clearly in that section now. It was
really beautiful because he is a beautiful person and it made me feel beautiful right along with him.
It’s so tempting as writers to posture ourselves in a way that makes it seem like we have all the answers. We write top ten lists.
We give advice. We package things in a way that promises to solve a whole bunch of problems. We speak up before we really know what we want to say. And I can see why the temptation is so great.
You can sell a million copies of your book without ever doing any of the hard work of writing. You can hire a writer. You can buy your way onto the New York Times Bestseller list.
But if we do all of this at the expense of the process—with-out showing up, withprocess—with-out listening, withprocess—with-out learning to wrestle, etc, etc—I think we miss the most valuable aspect of writing, the part of us that changes when we commit ourselves to the process.
Worse than that, I think the world misses out on us.
Authentic voices are not the loudest voices in the room, nec-essarily. They aren’t always the ones to garner the most attention.
But authentic voices, in my opinion, are grown over time, by peo-ple who are willing to do the hard work of showing up to the page, listening to themselves, wrestling with what they hear, seeing themselves as nuanced and letting go of control for long enough to speak what’s in their heart.
If you’re not sure this is you, don’t panic. Authentic voices are not born. They’re developed. They are not predestined. We grow into them, the same way we grow into ourselves. If this is some-thing you want to practice, try doing what I recommended the au-thor do that day: First, consider a topic really close to your heart.
Maybe it’s adoption, maybe it’s women in leadership, maybe it’s marriage or relationships, maybe it’s sexuality. I don’t know.
Whatever it is, consider what you might say if you were given a platform to say whatever you wanted. Give yourself permission
to write for a few minutes—to show up to the page, to listen to what your body is telling you, to wrestle, to be both right and wrong, to let go of control and to speak up. After you’ve written for a little while, go back and read what you wrote. What do you think? What emotions do you find expressed there? Is there anger? Fear? Grief?
Now, ask yourself this question: what is the story of these emo-tions?
Where did the fear come from?
What about the anger? What is the anger about?
Now, for another 30 minutes or so, write the story of those emotions. You can allow your body to speak for you if that’s help-ful (see the exercise from chapter 5), or you can just tell the story of their origin. What is their starting point?
If you’re anything like me, you’ll feel tremendous resistance at this point. This is the same resistance the author from the story above felt when I asked him to think about the story of his emo-tions on our Skype call. But I’ll ask you to try the same thing I asked him to try that day. Stay present with the feeling. Don’t push it away. Listen to what it is telling you. Wrestle with it for awhile, without trying to come to a “right” answer. Let go of what you think you should write and just write what’s in your heart.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll feel tremendous resistance at this point. This is the same resistance the author from the story above felt when I asked him to think about the story of his emo-tions on our Skype call. But I’ll ask you to try the same thing I asked him to try that day. Stay present with the feeling. Don’t push it away. Listen to what it is telling you. Wrestle with it for awhile, without trying to come to a “right” answer. Let go of what you think you should write and just write what’s in your heart.