You Almost Missed It
I want to ask you something. I hope you can be honest with yourself when you do.
Have you ever heard your own voice? Not your speaking voice. Not the one that orders the tea and runs the meeting and answers the emails. The other one. The one that is yours before anyone told you who you were supposed to be.
Take a moment with that.
I want to share something I have come to know. This is not a failure. That is not a character flaw. That is what happens when a committee has been running the meeting for so long that you stopped expecting anything else to be in the room.
Here is the thing nobody tells us about our own voice. It does not announce itself. It does not stand up at the front of the room and clear its throat and demand the floor. The committee is too loud for that. It has seniority. It has history. It is not about to make room for something quiet.
So our voice does something else entirely. It whispers.
And we almost miss it. Every single time.
Because we are busy. Because the committee is mid-session and the agenda is full, there are seventeen opinions on the table about the socks, the email we should have sent differently, the thing we said at dinner three weeks ago. Because nobody ever taught us to listen for it. Because nobody ever said, underneath all of that noise, there is something that belongs only to you. Sit still for a moment. Can you hear it? Do you want to? Do you know how? What would it even say?
We were given a committee before we had a voice of our own. With definitions, expectations, rules, and roles. We did our best with what we had and we managed. We also performed, well. And of course we kept things moving.
We were never told there was anything to listen for so we did not know a voice existed underneath it all.
Sometimes your voice slips into an opening during a crisis, loss, or even a simple change. As something inside gives way, your voice finally stirs.
Other times there is no catalyst at all. Just a Tuesday. A decision made without consulting anyone. A feeling noticed before there was time to talk ourselves out of it.
And then there are those of us for whom it has not come yet. Not because the voice is not there. But because the conditions were never right, the committee never quiet enough, the permission never given.
The voice was always there. It was always yours. It never needed anyone’s permission. It just needed to be found.
Here is what I have come to believe about the whisper.
The whisper is not dramatic. It rarely feels the way we imagined it would. There is no lightning. Not even a grand revelation. The committee does not dissolve. Everything does not suddenly make sense. We do not emerge, clear and certain, into the rest of our lives.
Our voice, this whisper, feels more like a quiet pull in a direction we cannot quite explain. A feeling in the body before the head has had time to weigh in. A moment of stillness in a moving life that we almost scroll past, almost fill with noise, almost dismiss as nothing.
Next week we keep walking together. Because finding the voice is only the first part. What we do with it is the whole rest of the journey.
But for now, just this. The next time the committee adjourns, even for a second, even just long enough for the tea to cool, sit in that quiet for one extra breath.
That quiet is yours. It always was.
And the voice has been waiting a long time. It would really love it if you showed up.
Inward. Onward. Go.
The Returning Project is a space where women reclaim who they truly are, beyond who they were told to be. New posts every Sunday.
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