And it’s funny because, although you feel lost, and you can’t find your voice, who’s doing the finding? That’s your voice. Your voice is looking for itself. Your voice is always there. It’s just that sometimes we don’t recognise it. We don’t recognise the reflection in the mirror, because it’s not what we were expecting. So sometimes to find your voice, you just have to have no expectation of what that voice is. Even if you think you remember it. Maybe it’s changed form in the meantime. So. It’s just about preparing yourself to find something that you didn’t know looked like that.
Finding our artistic voice. How do we find our artistic voice? Well, in order to find it, we’ve got to remember where we put it. Sometimes when I lose things, people say, where do you last remember having it? When was the last time you remember hearing your voice? That artistic voice that came out of nowhere and was unusually strong, took you by surprise, because you heard it so clearly. When you’re used to listening to everyone else’s voice, do you remember that time? When you remembered what your artistic voice sounded like? Because that’s where you’ll find it. If you think back to when you heard it the last time, take yourself back there. What were you doing at the time? Maybe you were sitting somewhere quietly. Because sometimes to hear the artistic voice, you have to listen in a place where it’s not going to be drowned out. But then other times you need to be in situations where the noise around you is so loud that you have to go inward, to hear yourself properly. You have to really travel inward, away from the noise and the distractions, to hear it. So, do you go inward or outward? Well, that depends. But you could try both. Go to galleries, look at things, saturate yourself in other people’s work, other people’s voices. How does it make you feel? Do you feel lost? Or do you feel like you’re finding part of yourself? Take yourself away from yourself. Sometimes you need to be lost. Things need to be lost before you can find them again. Joni Mitchell said you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And I think there are times when we feel lost and we don’t know how to find our voice, but the main thing is it’s always there. It’s always there. We can never lose it.
And I think maybe the journey is, it’s not really one of searching, of looking, of going forth, adventuring, or even retracing our steps. It’s about making ourselves where we are. Sometimes that’s the biggest surprise. That actually, to find your voice is to meet yourself coming back the other way. To just be so still that there is actually no movement, that there is no searching, and there is no finding, because you haven’t actually lost anything. It was never lost. It was only found. So finding your own voice is just remembering that it’s always been there. It’s not going anywhere, and it is permanently there with you. It’s just that sometimes it’s in a different form from what we expect.
