When I was at university, a long time ago now, my creative writing lecturer would always go on about finding your voice.
‘You need to find your voice,’ he’d scrawl in red pen on my submitted work.
I’ve fallen down the Google rabbit-hole of trying to figure out what the hell is meant by this. It’s similar to the whole, ‘find your true self’, bullshit that the self-help industry has been feeding me for two decades. In order to ‘find your voice’ you have to find your authenticity and put that out into the world which will inevitably feel vulnerable⏤the stepping into the arena and getting your arse whooped but that’s okay because it’s all part of the process thing (and you’ve got to trust the process).
All this seemed great for my peers. They seemed to intuitively get what all this meant while I wallowed behind them, trying on different voices much like trying on clothes at H&M, leaving me frustrated and with even lower self-esteem because this just didn’t seem to be designed for people like me and nothing really fit.
Last year I discovered the reason for this is because I’m autistic. Not your stereo-typed Sheldon Cooper type autistic. But highly-masked, good at pretending, people-are-my-special-interest-so-I-can-figure-out-this-socialising-thing type autistic.
One of the impacts of living highly masked for your whole life is that you don’t have a voice. There is no ‘authentic you’. There’s just an array of roles I fill and scripts I use to ‘fit in’ enough to get by.
There are other costs too. For me, there’s been decades of mental illness, chronic fatigue, and an ongoing feeling of isolation because you can’t truely connect with others if you’re not authentic. And now I’m not working as I’m so chronically burned out.
So this blog/newsletter/substack thing is going to be a journey of me contemplating life in an effort to find my voice. To just be myself. I’ll share it with the world in case it appeals to others, but I’m not here to build or appease an audience.
Join me if you want to.