I have realized that I’m trying to find my voice, my writer’s voice. I used to have one that worked, but…I lost it. I went through a really, really difficult life event—or cascade of events that piled up on each other with me crushed at the bottom of it—nine years ago, and I’m just beginning to understand that, beyond it breaking me, it changed me.
The trauma turned me into someone a little—maybe even a lot—different from who I was. And the problems I’m having with writing currently I think stem partly from me trying to live as a person I’m just not anymore; I’m following the instruction manual, but it’s out-of-date.
It’s as if I’m a .docx file trying to be loaded up into Word 97. There’s a lot of new metadata attached to this new file of me that the old system and software I’m trying to run it on simply can’t interpret or render effectively.
So, I feel like I have nothing to say anymore. I’m struggling with themes, and just generally keep returning to the question, “what’s the point?” And I think it’s because I’ve lost my writer’s voice. I’m trying to speak in someone else’s voice, a dead-and-gone me that sounds familiar but is just an echo reverberating off the walls of old habits and memories of myself as I once was. And that makes everything that comes out feels inauthentic.
I have to go through the whole process again that I went through when I first started writing, when I developed my Voice the first time. I have to start over.
I have to start over, all over, to find my Voice and my point again.
Uuuuuuggghhhh.