When you don't know what to say: Finding your voice in a world that won't stop talking

When God made me, he gave me two gifts: artistic skill, and an aptitude for written communication. Not a day goes by that I don't engage or feel incredibly grateful for these talents. They are my voice.

I remember my Year 6 teacher giving me a tongue-in-cheek Z+ for my assignment on the solar system, which I spent countless hours rewording and reworking to make visually and verbally perfect (insert atrocious, but perfectly placed, word-art here).

Then when I was fresh out of high-school, I spent hundreds of hours writing and designing quarterly magazines for my church youth group called YOU(th) (creative, I know). That blast from the past can be read here. But I should warn you, be prepared to be assaulted by poorly designed walls of text.

Looking back, there are so many times where I engaged these talents—like when I wrote scripts for school dramas, or church summer camps, or worked on the school newspaper, or did communications for my local church.

I was always intrinsically motivated to do these things. They improved my confidence and skill-set, I'd feel accomplished seeing a project come to life. I didn't care whether I ever got paid or not, or how much time it took. (Today, God has blessed me with a job where I do get paid, but that's a story for another day).

Ultimately, these experiences helped me find my voice.

Now, many chapters later, I am still motivated and love communicating through art and writing. But at the same time, I find myself equally held back by one sort-of-super-significant detail: I often feel like I don't have anything to say.

I stare at a blank canvas or empty page racking my brain for content. If I do begin, I usually start with an inspirational quote I've read recently and try to build on it, but often I run out of reflection about 200 words in (seriously, you should see the amount of draft blog posts in my archive).

And even if I do have something to say, I'll often self-sabotage. Like a single drop added to a vast ocean, I justify my silence by believing that my voice won't make a difference, and that no one cares.

I wrestle with this all the time, "God, why would you give me these skills if I don't have anything worth saying?" I then pray for wisdom and insight and hope that my brain juices ferment into a beautiful cocktail of life-changing words overnight.

They don't. And the cycle repeats.

Recently, God answered that prayer. But not in the way I was expecting. Rather than just giving me something to say, He told me why I didn't have anything. It's because I'm caught up in something I'll call "the output-worth equation".

Basically, it's the idea that the worthiness of your voice being heard is measured by the amount of content you produce, or its popularity, rather than its quality. I see symptoms of this mindset all the time: when accounts copy each other's posts or content, when artists take 10 photos of the same painting and post them over a week (rather than posting one photo of the whole artwork), or when people don't put any thought into their captions to save time (guilty!). The list goes on.

Let me clarify: I don't think there's anything wrong with these things per se, but I do think it can send people rolling down a slippery, never-ending slope of content-production, and picking up speed. With so much pressure to *post every day*, *always be active on stories*, *be online an hour after you post* and *create clickable/shareable content*, we've got dizzy and lost our way, our minds, and ourselves in the process.

God has begun to teach me that in order to have something to say, I need to stop trying to roll the fastest, and remember why I started rolling in the first place. I need to stop and make the exhausting, sweaty, slow climb back up the hill to get some perspective. And when I start rolling again, I need to take it slower and more purposefully, and stop before the speed gets out of control.

Weird metaphors aside, in order to find our voice we need to slow down, embrace silence and solitude, and learn who we are and what we care about. Crucially, this must be distinguished from what others care about, or what you should care about (but that's the topic for tomorrow's post).

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say—Barbara Kingslover.

We need to do some introspection, learn and grow from our failures and experiences, and then teach others what we've learned.

Because ultimately, I'd rather be a peaceful, calming presence in a sea of chaos than a content-queen spinning out of control. And even if that means reaching less people, or producing less, I would choose quality over quantity any day.

Practically, here are some things I've done—or that you can do—to start this process of introspection:

• Try out some great writing prompts online

• Begin a journal that repeats itself over three years and compare entries

• Hunt for memories in old photo albums or social media archives

• Buy a conversation prompts card game (or something similar) and play it with close friends or family

• Pray, journal and meditate

• Go for nature walks without your phone and let your mind wander

• Learn more about yourself: Take personality tests, watch videos on the psychology of development, write down goals and dreams, make a list of your values

Problems occur when we become so busy trying to produce content that we neglect time to produce meaningful content. But it's not only finding time that's a limiting factor here, it's also external pressure telling us what's *acceptable* and *unacceptable* to say. And that can be even more difficult to figure out.

So, tomorrow, we'll be talking about group-think, political correctness and something I'll call "choir mentalities".

Catch you then X Maryellen