Finding Your Voice (When You’ve Been Speaking Everyone Else’s Language)

There comes a moment — sometimes quietly, sometimes like a punch in the gut — when you realize:

You’ve spent years speaking words that weren’t really yours.
Saying yes when you meant no.
Smiling through things that made your stomach turn.
Trying to keep the peace, keep everyone happy, keep the ship afloat.

And somewhere along the way…
you lost track of your own voice.

The one that lives in your gut.
The one that rises in your throat when something doesn’t feel right.
The one that gets quiet when you talk yourself out of what you already know.

Maybe you were the one who kept things together.
The one who made themselves smaller so others could shine.
The one who became so many things for so many people, you forgot how to be with yourself.

But your voice? It’s still in there.
Not lost. Not gone. Just buried under layers of shoulds, roles, and survival strategies.

Finding it again isn’t about being louder.

It’s about listening.
It’s about making space.
It’s about noticing what happens in your body when something rings true — or doesn’t.
It’s about learning to tell the difference between fear and your intuition.
Between who you had to be, and who you actually are.

Sometimes it’s a whisper at first.
A soft “I don’t want this.”
A quiet “I need a break.”
A strange and sudden desire that doesn’t make sense on paper, but feels alive in your bones.

This is how you begin.

You notice.
You get curious.
You stop making yourself wrong for wanting more.
And you start trusting that your truth — even if it shakes things up — is worth listening to.

You don’t owe anyone the version of you that kept you small.

Finding your voice isn’t a one-time thing.
It’s a return. A remembering.
A practice of checking in, over and over:
Is this mine?
Is this true?
Does this fit?

And when it doesn’t?

You let go.
Even if it’s awkward.
Even if it’s unfamiliar.
Even if your hands shake a little.

Because your voice matters.
And the world doesn’t need another polite, perfect, pleasing version of you.
It needs you — the real one.

The one who knows what she wants.
The one who’s learning to ask for it.
The one who’s done living in someone else’s story.

Come home to your voice.
It’s been waiting.