I woke up this morning and began by reading an affirmation. As I started to speak, my throat felt scratchy and I sounded a bit like a donkey.
Uh-oh.
I know what this is. And it couldn’t be a worse time.
Tomorrow, I am teaching my first online workshop, How To Speak Your Truth, so certainly, waking up the day before and facing the possibility that I may be doing the workshop without a voice was deeply ironic and somewhat terrifying.
Now that I’ve been awake for a little while, I think my voice is fine, but that is not the point of this story. The point of this story is to say:
Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes.
Or, more appropriately for me, speak your truth, even if you sound like a sacred farm animal.
Waking up to this throat business today, one of the first thoughts I had was that I would have to cancel the class tomorrow. I couldn’t possibly teach people how to speak their truth if I wasn’t in my fullest, most powerful sound. We all imagine that speaking our truth makes us sound like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or James Earl Jones. We will be boomingly resonant and cause earthquakes in other countries and the entire world will hear us and agree. Or, that could quite possibly just be what Ithink. :0)
But there is something I just posted on facebook yesterday:
Which is something that I’ve been doing a lot lately. I’ve been speaking up more in graduate school, sharing parts of myself that I haven’t before in an academic setting. Last Friday, I invited my entire Feminist Pedagogy class to come to Wednesday night yoga with me if they were interested in learning more about the Divine Feminine. Some of the women in the room looked at me like I just invited them to conjure the dead, as spiritual stuff is not the most popular subject in an Ivy League classroom. My voice was shaking as I was sharing a bit about how much I love this yoga class, the teacher, and how I feel it makes me a stronger woman. When I was done speaking I felt relieved, and then the feeling of embarrassment quickly began to rise from my belly and I had the thought that maybe I should’ve kept that to myself. A few people in the room seemed really uncomfortable, and I felt a small tinge of regret for choosing yoga and the Divine Feminine as my “tell us more about you” topic, when I could’ve shared one of my many socially-acceptable baseball card highlights:
I wrote and co-produced my first R&B album three years ago.
I like making my own hair products.
I climbed the highest peak in the northeastern US in the rain.
Why didn’t I just pick one of those?! Oh, Jillian.
Instead, I chose to speak about something that was a little bit scary for me to bring up; that was uncomfortable for me and maybe for others. But it was also the most true thing I wanted to say in that moment. That’s what I really wanted to talk about. Sharing a bit about my love for this class was a beautiful practice in merging my academic/intellectual life and my “real life” off-campus. I could’ve chosen to say something arbitrary (“I like watching ‘Friends’ to de-stress!”), but I chose to speak to a major interest that is real and present and a bit off the beaten path.
You’d think that’d be a bigger hit in a feminist classroom. But speaking about it was definitely a start. Maybe it sparked an idea in someone else. Maybe it will spark a bigger conversation later. I’d never know if I never said anything.
I used to have this belief that people who said or did brave things had conquered all of their fear. I used to think that when they were speaking up about an injustice or preaching an edgy sermon or teaching a new theory to a class that that meant they had dealt with all of their fear and it wasn’t an issue for them anymore.
Now I know the only difference between people who use their voices bravely and people who don’t is that the brave ones take action even though they feel afraid, even though they are nervous, even though they don’t know what the reaction might be.
I don’t know that Dr. King’s quiver during his famed ‘Mountaintop’ speech was all for show. He might’ve been scared. A little bit scared. But he spoke the truth anyway.
So this isn’t about being perfect and waiting until you get it right. “Right” is not a real thing. While planning and not reacting compulsively are both vital for speaking your truth, sometimes your body is literally ahead of your throat and you just start to say something. You’re likely speaking directly from your heart. And
What you have to say may be a little rude, or grammatically incorrect, but it may be exactly what needs to be said.
We all want more honesty and closeness and love with other people, and speaking the truth is a big part of that. It’s worth the shaky sound of your vocal chords meeting. It’s worth it if the result is more love.
<3
Jillian