Sometimes I go to speak...

Sometimes I go to speak…. And it’s like every organ in my body has shut down. The ones that help me to breathe, dilute, process. It’s like a clamp is on my throat. It’s like my brain has been wiped clear.

Sometimes I go to speak, and everything I am so passionate about is crowding on the other side of a thin curtain, but I cannot push the curtain aside to share my bounty of knowledge.

Sometimes I go to speak and someone has turned the power-off button on my body. All that glorious, lived, authentic knowledge that I have culled over a lifetime is sitting there in my powered-off body, with no way to be communicated to those around me.

Sometimes I go to speak and someone has turned all the bright lights on. They are blinding me and I am stunned into silence.

Sometimes I go to speak and my soul remembers how it was born into silencing.

Every bright, beautiful, true thought that I formulated was crushed in the fabricated ether of conformity to strict dogma. Rerouted, funneled to somewhere deep in my body, where it would gestate until it found a safe time to come out and give voice.

Why has it been my experience to know this? Why has it been millions of women’s experiences to know this? Do we need to know why? We are brave beyond reasoning.

And now, in this new dawn where the collective voice is finding free speech – where is my singular voice in all of this?

How can I find the courage to speak up? Amidst the dying embers of what checked me? How can I move past the blocks, which were winnowed so deeply into my being?

It has taken a lifetime of peeling away layers to get to where I am today. Making free choices. Living the life I choose to live, regardless of what others think.

There have been times in my life where I have broken through to another mode of expression – when I dance, sing, cry, feel, listen – sometimes even my silences have been the most powerful, earth shifting prayers of release.

Words are not the only way to communicate. And maybe this is what life is trying to teach me right now. There are many effective non-verbal ways to communicate, the ways which will move the mountains that words cannot even touch.

I just need to trust that there is a reason I am this way. Even if I never understand, that is okay. If we were all speakers, orators, and eloquent arguers – who would change the world by listening? By feeling? By seeing what others do not see?

Sometimes I go to speak and what I have to say is so important, that I cannot find words expressive enough to say it. So I stay silent, and people assume that because I do not speak, I have nothing to say. They may think that I have no contribution or an inadequate intellect.

What I have to say is so important, that the only way I can express it is to live it.

Sometimes I go to speak, and somehow I know, deep in my bones, that I am not to speak, but to live.

I am not meant to speak it. I am meant to cry it, dance it, exude it – until its essence permeates everything so fully – that no one will ever know it was not true.