24 Years Without a Voice (And How To Find Yours)

For 24 years of my life—from ages 5-29—I existed without a voice.

Not literally mute, but spiritually stunted and emotionally abandoned.

So, when I wrote a poem for the first time in 2021, it felt like taking a real breath of air.

Each syllable was oxygen and each line was a reunion with a part of me I didn't know I was missing.

The writing and the words themselves weren't the point—the quality of depth or performance didn't really matter. What mattered most was the sound of my spirit finally breaking through.

The excavation of a self I'd buried beneath layers of doubt, depression, and a discontent disconnection.

Like that tarot card near the drum circle one told me—I was transmuting light one poem, one word, one syllable at a time.

There was no treasure to be found.

The digging was gold.

And I was uncovering myself.

What Is Your Voice, and How Do You Find It?

Poetry isn't the point of why I'm writing this.

I want to talk about voice—and my mom (more and that later).

After writing my first poem, I became obsessed with the idea of "finding my voice."

Where did it go? What does it need? What does it want? How does it bleed?

I would share a poem to anyone who would listen, not realizing at the time I was subconsciously filling a need to be witnessed, to simply express a truth and have someone receive it without it needing to be fixed.

But something like finding your voice can be exhausting, abstract, and downright.

I’ll share some up-front, no bullshit examples from my own life to show the direct impact that finding my voice had in my life. It will be in a straightforward before, during, and after structure.

Before Finding My Voice

The idea of finding your voice can be very abstract and hard to grasp.

I’ve spent 4 years actively searching for it without ever realizing I had already found it since day one. Funny how treasure seems to work.

Long before ever being aware of what my voice was or how to find it, my life was in chaos:

• Self abandonment through addictions and being a hopeless romantic—or as I once wrote by mistake, a ropeless romantic.

• Only drinking to get drunk. Drinking only to the point of getting messy that my friends were forced to hold an intervention for me. It was the single most humiliating experience of my life.

• Signing a lease to live with two guys who were taking advantage of me financially, yet I didn't have the confidence or courage to speak up for myself and walk away. I lived with them for over a year.

• Raging and shaming myself against my coping mechanisms to childhood trauma and viewing myself as character deficient—rather than just a human who was suffering and in pain and surviving the only ways I knew how.

• Surrendering to every single thought I had as authority that I had to listen to, identify with, and act on.

I had a complete lack of agency, impulse control, and self-respect. In retrospect, I was living with an inner bully who thrived from shaming, judging,and limiting me any way he could.

I wouldn't advocate for myself at work (I once missed out on a 20k commission check).

I didn't know how to express my feelings to someone that I loved or wanted to be with, constantly missing the train and always failing to launch.

I became small and avoidant when visiting my family.

I settled for inconvenience and less than ideal circumstances because that was what I thought I deserved.

The Messy Middle

The journey to finding my voice—much like going through the motions of addiction, avoidance, and escape—was anything but fun.

It was filled with work that I spent most of my existence running away from:

• It involved a lot of writing and reflection.

• It involved a lot of revisiting old stories with new frames.

• It involved a hell of a lot of failed therapy attempts (and still, to this day, I've yet to find a successful long term therapist. It's as if life has been guiding me through other modalities of healing…)

• It involved more crying in year 29 than in the previous 28 combined.

• It involved a ton of grief.

• It involved learning how to make a podcast from scratch because I had too much creative energy than I knew what to do with.

• It involved confessing love to someone 4.5 years too late, knowing full well I would fall flat on my face—but doing it anyway to because I knew I needed to honor my heart if I wanted to move forward with my life, no matter how much it would suck.

• It involved working for free because I felt too unworthy to charge for services.

• It involved being forced to use the only voice I had—on my own in a group of 30 men in a maximum security prison.

• It involved getting intimidated by a peer facilitator who wanted to treat the classroom like prison culture, and eventually getting the confidence to confront and correct him and redirect the energy to a more welcoming environment.

• It involved looking death in the eyes and helping others do the same before they die.

• It involved release, rest, and retreat. Specifically, a darkness meditation where I stayed in a pitch black room for three days to completely confront my myself and my mind (read more here here).

• It involved a lot of humility, rejection, courage, failure, peeling off scabs from old wounds so I could bleed and heal—properly.

• it involved panic attacks in Philadelphia—where my own bullshit got in the way of enjoying the company of friends I hadn’t seen in years.

• It involved asking my therapist to help me move on from someone once and for all, only for my therapist to convince me I was still in love with and that my love story wasn’t worth giving up on yet.

• It involved listening to my therapist's advice and going back to this person to try to build a bridge over a voice note only to get left on read.

• It involved feeling betrayed, full of rage and self pity.

• it involved more ego deaths than I can count, and am still resistant to add more to the list.

• It involved leaving a job that promised more long-term security than most other industries.

• It involved letting go of my status and identity as a sales professional.

• It involved giving back the keys to the company car and kissing goodbye a relatively easy-as-far-as-effort goes six figure salary.

• It involved making little to no money for an 18 month stretch—but being happier, fuller, and higher on life.

• It involved giving myself a death date so that I can look life in the eye and not having anyone to lie to but myself about how aligned I was really living.

• It involved so much soul-excavating, paradigm-crushing, mind-opening, heart-expanding, life-enriching, deep, messy, ugly work that never ends.

• It involved crying tears of frustration from desperation to grow.

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Thank you for reading that if you're still reading.

The moments in that list sucked. They were scary, and I was afraid of the discomfort that came with them.

But those hard times never defined me—even though I thought they did all the while through.

Even though it felt like I was making no progress the entire time.

But through all of that, somehow, someway—I found my voice.

I stepped in the fire, rolled around in the stones, got burned a lot but never enough to stop moving.

It hurt until it didn't anymore.

And it's transformed everything about my life and my relationships.

(After)Life With My Voice

The loudest evidence of finding my voice has been in how I show up in my relationships today—particularly with my family.

I've had a rocky relationship with my parents over the years.

On phone calls with them, I would show up as short, vague, disinterested, blank, and numb.

Any time spent together was spent almost exclusively watching movies or eating since interactions couldn't go deeper than surface level conversations.

This changed last year, though, when we started therapy as a family—including my parents who have been divorced for 15 years.

We needed guidance to communicate with each other better.

There was plenty of love and support and time together, but our connections were stagnant—stuck in a cycle of avoidance, non-confrontation, and procrastination, keeping the same childhood dynamics alive.

The therapy wasn't just about healing old wounds, but creating a new language between us, one where my voice could eventually be heard and my mom's could inevitably be witnessed. This shift from avoidance to appreciation became the foundation for what happened next, a conversation that would change about how we connect.

From Avoidance to Witnessing

When visiting my mom recently, she wanted to talk about a book of mine that she borrowed (The Third Jesus by Deepak Chopra) so we sat down to talk about it.

However, instead of asking about the book first, she instead dove headfirst into a very personal question.

"Why were you so depressed after coming back from the Peace Corps?" She probed.

I had opened up about this briefly during a previous family therapy session, and she wanted to know more.

This urgently curious approach was not new for her, but what was new for me was that I didn't deflect or give just a one word response of dismissal.

I answered.

I elaborated.

I was honest and open and a little awkward too.

I was using my voice, connecting with a part of myself that had long been silenced.

Making Space For Everyone But My Family

But it didn't stop there.

Once we got into the book material, I felt like I became an entirely new person at the table with her.

After she witnessed me, I was able to hold space for her, completely and unconditionally.

The same way I do with the men I work with behind bars or those at the end of their life.

But for some reason, whenever it came to my family, I would forget everything I knew about holding space and facilitating conversations the second I walked through the door.

(A sibling called me out on this once, and rightfully so—it was a mystery why I could hold space for anyone except my own blood.)

Whatever blockage I had that prevented me from showing up as my authentic self with my family—it had finally lifted.

I was able to fully listen and support my mom without flinching, without wanting to get up, without wanting to interrupt or change the conversation or finish her sentences for her.

I held space for her to confront something as deep and difficult as examining deeply rooted, dogmatic beliefs. To hold her hand while contemplating new beliefs that a previous version of her would have run away from and chastised.

And in the process, she arrived at a universe inside of her that she had not been aware of before.

She experienced and arrived somewhere that our experience with religion was not able to provide: unconditional love—full, true, and boundless.

Unconditional Love

In real time, my mom experienced the power of seeing someone in her life through a lens of grace, empathy, and compassion. Where before she only saw differences and reasons for disagreement, she now found only love—the kind of unconditional love that both sides of our culture demand but rarely give.

It wasn't that she turned over each stone of judgment one by one and rationalized her way out of it.

She found a love that quickly and overwhelmingly outweighed any conceivable reason for judgment.

The kind of love that wasn't abstract.

The kind of love that makes space for growth without judgment and values truth over alignment.

The kind of love that witnesses someone in their full humanity through hues of grace, a contrast to the black and white binary of dogma we both experienced in our religious upbringing—the right and wrong, do's and don'ts, saved or unsaved ways of thinking and categorizing other humans.

She arrived in a space where she got a window into the world that I live in. A world filled with second chances, room for humanity, and enough grace to outweigh any wrong.

Witnessing her transformation in real time wasn't just about her finding unconditional love.

It was about seeing her spirit express itself freely, perhaps for the first time ever in the way it was always meant to.

What Your Voice Actually is

Of course I wouldn't end this without a definition to give you. :)

Here is as simply as I can put it (which I admit is not often very simple lol)

Your voice is not just the sound of your voice that comes from your throat.

It's what fills it and how it comes out.

Your voice is the expression of your spirit.

It's the way you move through the world.

It's the way you sit in your silence and the way you soak up your smiles.

It's owning the way only you can see the world and sharing the beauty from your view.

It's the light you fight for, the sighting of light in others.

It's the way you forgive, accept, and empower others through their own journeys of growth, forgiveness, reconciliation, reckoning, and ascension.

Where in your life might you be keeping your true voice silent?

What is desperate to be expressed in the depths of your being?

What conversations have you been avoiding with others?

What conversations have you been avoiding with yourself?

What are you doing with innate ability and power to transform?

What would life look like if you approached it with presence, authenticity, and with all the best parts of yourself that your soul has to offer?

Any excitement received that fuels a shift in your beliefs is your voice in action.

It's the same advice as old as time: follow your bliss. Follow your excitement.

Follow the breadcrumbs until you find the loaf. At all costs.

What’s worse is paying the price of not being yourself.

I hope this resonates with you.

Prompts to Find Your Voice

This morning, I journaled on three simple yet profound questions that can be very useful for identifying your voice within the noise.

Take 30 minutes to answer these questions below. Ideally ten minutes per question. Write with an intention to witness yourself rather than judge or improve.

1. What have I accomplished?

2. What enjoyable experiences did you have in the last year?

3. When have you felt like your most authentic self?

Life is always talking to us.

Reflecting on these prompts will help you listen.

Sending you all much love.

P.S. If you're curious about the conversation with my mom that I referenced above, you can listen to our actual discussion in the podcast episode: " Me, My Mom, and The God Between Us ."

Available on: YouTube | Spotify | ApplePodcasts

and everywhere else you listen to podcasts :)

I hope you all have a gentle and loving Mothers Day Weekend 🙏🏽❤️