Voice

Exactly twenty years ago I left home with dreams of becoming a writer. Writer was my first dream. A close second was owning a bookstore in Manhattan like Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail. And if those aspirations didn’t work out, I’d happily settle to write a weekly column, have a fabulous shoe collection, and eat brunch with my girlfriends at the hottest restaurants. However, in my first Writing for Mass Media class, the professor suggested I take his Voice and Diction course to “get out of your throat” he told me. His public criticism of my audible voice was so humiliating that I could only imagine how he would obliterate my writing voice. That afternoon while my roommate watched TRL next door, I cried on my bed and came up with snide comebacks I wasn’t brave enough to say to his face; mainly that I never planned to be on stage or camera. Voice or no voice, I could write. The next week, because this is how rational and wise eighteen-year-old me was, I dropped Journalism and took core courses until I eventually and unenthusiastically enrolled in the business school. None of my decisions made any sense but, again, I was young and hurt and embarrassed and felt like I didn’t belong. I also never wanted to see that professor again.

I soon realized my peers in business school looked down on everyone else. A group of female upperclassmen laughed at the girls who wanted to be schoolteachers. “We didn’t come to college to do our A-B-Cs,” if I remember their words correctly. Memorizing business statutes and finance formulas was torture, and my few Marketing classes kept me sane. However, I couldn’t push writing out of my mind, and as I explained this to my academic advisor, she guided me to minor in English. I walked more briskly across campus to the English department where people wore scarves in eighty-degree weather and drank obscene amounts of coffee. I still had Statistics to trudge through in business school but studying mid-century British authors and participating in writing workshops began to restore what I had allowed a single individual to squelch.

After graduation, business school landed me a job with little to no creative work, so I blogged and joined writing forums. Facebook came along and blogs became less popular. Then came Twitter, then Instagram. And while I enjoy seeing pictures of my nieces and nephews, I look back and wonder how we ended up writing in tiny squares with likes and comments and puppy dog filters. Influencer is now a job title, tweets make national news, and Instagram personalities write…ahem, “write” best-selling books. Times change, and for writing it is no different.

Twenty years later it’s only natural for me to play the what-if game. What if I had ignored the theatre professor (teaching a writing course, tsk tsk), and instead kept showing up? What if I told eighteen-year-old me that minoring in English would not add any value to her resume but would add everything to other components of her life? That art and beauty and the written word would continue to heal the most uncertain and uncommon places, and those measly fifteen hours would keep showing up, even into her late thirties, and be she’d be grateful to have them even when the next email read your submission has not been selected and your voice is not what we’re looking for. What if I told her that six words of copy on a greeting card would feel as triumphant as finishing a marathon? Would it keep her going? Would she think it was worth it? I still walk away at times, feeling underqualified, embarrassed, or like the outsider. Other times the words come faster than I can type, and the words are quickly and warmly received. It’s part of the dance and I keep showing up- finding a tiny corner to write, hitting post, editing, editing, and more editing, being selected, being rejected, and submitting my little heart out.