The Beauty in Sharing Your Voice

Someone once told me, “Healing isn’t a linear process. You’re gonna have your highs and lows and it’s gonna suck, but once you make the effort and get where you wanna be, you’ll be glad you went through it.” The statement circulates through my memory sometimes because I realized that while that statement has defined the reason I’m standing here today, it applies to so much more. It’s applied to my health, my acting, and most importantly: my writing. 

Everyone goes through phases of their life, only for it to be placed under a label. I was placed under the “weird kid” label. It didn’t help that I was basically given unrestricted internet access as a pre-teen. I quickly discovered social media and the online communities known as fandoms. I fell in love with how easily people could share what they liked, how easy it was to make friends behind the screen. I fell even more in love with the art of writing fanfiction. It became my main medium of storytelling for years. The idea of setting stories outside of canon with my own characters in a pre-existing fictional world inspired me. I started out on Wattpad, sharing short fanfictions about my self insert character becoming part of the band Gorillaz. There’s no success story behind it, just a girl and her computer. 

The only people who knew about my writing were my closest friends. We’d share Google Docs back and forth with each other, letting the other person add their characters for more creative shenanigans! It wasn’t just my voice, it was the people around me that influenced how I write. That’s the beauty of fiction with friends, after all. 

My writing only improved as I got older, but with these improvements came an overactive imagination and the urge to write every single idea I had. I abandoned multiple projects whenever I couldn’t chase the excitement of writing a new story. I burned out very quickly. I was writing stories I didn’t actually feel passionate about, it showed by how hesitant I was to write them. I was going from creatively gifted to losing my spark. Was this the end of my outlet? Was I really destined to do better things?

I took a step back from writing and tried new things. I tried to skateboard but it wasn’t fun doing it on a sloped sidewalk as a beginner. Archery only lasted a few months before I gave up due to mental health problems. Drawing was fun until I began comparing my abilities to my peers. I went to art school, I thought. I should know how to draw well by now. I started distancing myself from that too. The most I could do was draw fictional characters I saw on Pinterest, nothing that came out of my artistic brain was original. Not like I was before. Then, I found a new outlet: roleplaying. 

When COVID started and I couldn’t go outside, I found myself on Discord, constantly talking with my friends. I was once again unconsciously becoming the characters I adored. I started making new ones, excited to assist in the plots that my friends created. It was like my voice was slowly coming back. From anime roleplays to original ones, I met new people. I became part of new groups, people that encouraged me to speak on days I didn’t want to. Even after COVID ended, I found myself heavily roleplaying on Discord. I found myself in a relationship with one of my roleplaying partners. Things seemed to be looking up creatively… until they weren’t. 

As I dove deeper into my high school years, the motivation to roleplay decreased dramatically. My classes needed more of my attention, and on top of that, I found a new hobby. I started community theatre. My creative voice was stronger, just not in the ways they previously were. I found myself unintentionally distancing myself from the friends that I’d drop everything to be with just years ago. I found confidence in my acting, not my writing. Understanding as my partner and friends were, I felt awful for distancing myself from them. The online group I had been roleplaying with for a couple years drifted apart. I was focusing more on myself in person, not online. I was passionate about acting more than writing, a polar opposite of the kid I was pre COVID. 

I see now that this wasn’t the end of the world: it was an evolution. My voice was gaining range and variety. It was like a soprano on testosterone long term: the voice starts really high and ends up deeper as it continues taking more of the hormone until it ends up a bass. I started as a cringey Wattpad writer and now, I’m embracing all aspects of my voice. I found a way to use all of my strengths with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons. It combines my acting and my writing capabilities and puts them into a fantasy world with other people. Their voices are all varied. Some are good at writing, others are better at roleplaying. It’s like a sports team: you have people of different skill levels helping each other reach a common goal. What was even better was that the party was primarily artists and writers like myself. We enhanced each other’s voices. It was easy for us to create.

So why am I saying this? What does this talk about nerdy interests have to do with my voice as a writer? Well, if it weren’t for those experiences, I wouldn’t be here. If anything, I think my voice would be more boring. The moments you’re part of shape the human mind, it shapes your creative output. What do I mean? The reason I’m able to write about such vulnerable and sensitive topics is because I either lived the experience or knew someone who did. All of my characters are based in my reality in some way. A lot of the characters I create are either part of the LGBTQ community, neurodivergent, mentally ill or all of the above. Is everything they go through exactly what I did? No, only aspects. The rest just comes to me. It’s like a small voice inside of my head tells me what they should be. If I’m unfamiliar with a problem or illness, I’ll do research or ask someone I know with the exact thing I’m researching about their experiences. 

I often wonder what it would be like if I didn’t have the creative spark that I do, if I couldn’t use my voice creatively. What if I couldn’t create at all? How would I tell my story? That’s the true beauty. Those “what if” questions lead to a reason why I create. I create to make sense of the random scenarios in my brain. I create to relate to others. Most importantly, however, I create to share the parts of me that I used to be ashamed of. I create to show that little girl who was mocked for how she expressed herself that it’s okay to be creative. There’s no need to hide the best part of myself. My story matters, and so does yours. Keep sharing your voice, no matter what others say.