The Cost of Finding My Voice

Sometimes finding your voice feels less like empowerment and more like exposure.

My subconscious has been on a strange ride lately.  A dream from the other night has been lingering at the edges of my mind.

I was at a water park, one of those chaotic places where noise echoes off the concrete and water rushes in every direction. In the middle of it all, I ran into an old colleague. She was someone I used to admire for her boldness, the kind of person who never seemed afraid to speak her mind.

But in the dream, she wasn’t just a colleague.

She was my doctor.

She told me I needed a blood draw.

Except instead of my arm, she took the blood directly from my head.

To do it, she shaved off my hair.

When I woke up, the image stayed with me. The syringe going into my head. The blood being extracted from it. My hair being physically removed just to reach it.

It felt like a metaphor for what it can be like to find your voice.

Sometimes it doesn’t arrive gently. Sometimes the moment you say something out loud, something you wrote or posted, you immediately wish you could take it back.

Sometimes something inside you insists on being pulled into the light. And nothing, no person, no expectation, can keep it buried.

Something vulnerable.

Something you can’t hide anymore.

And often, the people we once admired for their boldness are the ones who quietly teach us how much courage it takes to claim our own.

Growing up, I didn’t think anyone would take me seriously because of my stutter. I had so much to say, but I was terrified to say it. If a conversation ever turned confrontational and I started stuttering, I would sometimes notice a smirk spread across the other person’s face, like they had already won.

The stutter didn’t mean I was less educated or less informed. It was my nervous system responding to stress. When the body’s fight-or-flight response activates, it can disrupt the brain’s ability to coordinate speech.

Sometimes the reaction was the smirk. Other times it was a strained, confused expression, a mix of “just spit it out” and “you’re not making any sense.” Either way, it was meant to degrade me. Diminish me. Make me feel like my voice didn’t matter.

Even typing this out, I can picture it happening. I can see the little girl I once was shrinking into a shell of herself. She learned very early that she was safest when she stayed small and did not make too much noise.

As a child, you develop instincts for survival. I knew I didn’t have to change the world. I just had to get through the day.

But as I got older, I began to realize something unsettling.

Staying quiet and maintaining the status quo does not actually make you safer.
Reality does not pause just because we choose not to look at it.

Maybe it isn’t happening to you. Not yet.

But it is happening.

It is happening.

To children growing up in places where peace has never been guaranteed.
To girls who leave for school in the morning expecting to return home.
To families seeking safety who find themselves detained instead of protected.
To young people whose histories - especially Black histories - are erased by the very systems meant to teach them.

I am not saying these things to sensationalize anything. I say them because they are real. And for a long time, I simply didn’t see it.

For most of my life, I believed staying quiet was the safest option.

Now I’m beginning to understand that silence is often the very thing that allows harmful systems to continue.

Whether you believe in God, a higher power, or nothing at all after we die, I struggle to believe that this level of suffering is what anyone or anything had in mind when this beautiful planet came into existence.

I am no longer afraid to speak.

I understand that it might cost me readers, opportunities, and approval. But I also believe that when you show up as your authentic self, you begin to attract the people who are meant to be in your life.

This is not for everyone. It was never meant to be.

Comfort has never changed the world.

So I am going to keep speaking.

I will speak even if I stutter over every word.
Even if my voice shakes.
Even if I start crying halfway through a sentence.

Not because emotion means I am unstable or overreacting, but because it means I am human.

And this is what it looks like when a human being refuses to stay silent.

Sometimes I still think about that dream.

The syringe going into my head.
The blood being drawn out.
The hair shaved away so nothing could hide what was underneath.

At the time, it felt violent.

Now I think it was something else entirely.

It was my voice, finally being pulled out of me.

Once a voice is pulled into the light, it refuses to go dark again.