For years, my life felt like sprinting on a treadmill. Running as hard as I could, desperate to get somewhere different, only to look down and realize I was standing in the same place.
Now it feels like I stepped off the treadmill and onto one of those moving walkways in an airport. Somehow, I’m moving faster while working so much less.
Not less in life. Less to be understood.
The treadmill was never one person, or one relationship, or one season. It was the ground I kept ending up on.
Growing up, I didn’t know I had a voice worth using. Instead, I made my voice into whatever others wanted to hear, hoping that meant they wouldn’t leave. I learned early that people come and go, that love felt conditional, and decided the safest thing I could do was become whatever a person wanted me to be.
I learned to disappear to be kept.
I did it with everyone.
I even did it with God.
In Sunday school rooms, in friendships, in places I was supposed to feel safe, the lesson was the same: some feelings were dangerous, and being wanted mattered more than being known. I carried it into every room after, and for years, I mistook it for the way the world simply worked.
Fast forward to later years, and that disappearing act landed me in a life full of crises.
Turns out, if you are willing to disappear to be kept, you lose yourself along the way. The pain finally grew so big that I had to try something different. I started going to therapy. At first, my voice there was shaky and small. I left the building feeling like I might be sick every time I let out something that had never seen air. But slowly, with time and my therapist’s love, it became the place where my voice learned to grow.
It took me years of that work just to believe that what was happening inside me deserved to come out. That my feelings weren’t inconveniences to manage privately. That hurt was allowed to hurt. That having a need didn’t make me needy. That my experience was worth putting into words.
I had to learn my voice deserved to take up space before I could learn how to use it.
And finally, something shifted. I realized if what was in me didn’t come out in other rooms, I would explode. My voice mattered. I finally started trying to speak outside the therapy walls. But my words didn’t land the same. They weren’t met with the same love and curiosity. So I started working on how I said it. That must be the problem.
I learned the formulas. Acknowledge the other person first. Talk about how I felt, not who they are. Don’t attack their character. Stay curious. Sometimes I wrote down exactly what I wanted to say before I said it, rearranging sentences until I was sure they couldn’t wound. I would check my own heart first. Am I saying this to hurt them? Is there a kinder way to say it?
There was so much work behind every sentence. Work to believe I was allowed to feel it. Work to believe I was allowed to say it. Work to make sure I said it with care.
And then I would speak.
And so often, nothing landed. Or worse, it caused frustration.
So I did what I knew how to do. I worked harder. I softened the words. Rearranged them. Made them smaller. Made them longer. There was always one more version of the sentence I could try.
I had finally learned not to silence myself.
I hadn’t yet learned that being willing to speak and being somewhere willing to hear are two different things.
I was sprinting harder and harder out of respect for my voice, but every time I looked down, I was in the same place.
—
One of the strangest things about my life now is this: I speak. And people hear me.
At work. In friendships. Not only do my words have somewhere to go: they land. Someone considers them. Responds. Sometimes even changes because of them.
I spent years perfecting the first sentence. I didn’t know how much more I had to say once I was finally allowed to finish it. I remember the feeling all too well: a whole tangled line of thoughts and beliefs and ideas, coiled up inside me, longing to be seen and known. So much in me deserved to be known, and I had to watch it stay buried anyway.
I thought maybe even all that trapped self would be beautiful to someone. But it never saw the light of day.
Sprinting on that treadmill, out of breath, there was no room for depth. I was trapped behind the first sentence. Please hear me. Please see me. Please believe that what I’m telling you matters.
But when you’re received, something opens. You get to move past proving what you feel and start wondering what it means.
—
The language inside me is kinder now.
Less suspicious. Less demanding. I don’t cross-examine every feeling before I allow myself to have it.
And maybe the strangest thing I’ve learned is that my emotions aren’t actually that big. My friends tell me all the time that I need to feel more. For years, they felt enormous. Every feeling was something to explain, defend, soften, or contain.
But anything has to get louder when it’s fighting to exist.
I can have a feeling, and it can simply be a feeling. I can notice something and trust that I noticed it. The people around me now aren’t afraid of my depth. They welcome it.
Slowly, I’ve started to understand that these things aren’t defects around the edges of who I am. They’re the color in who I am.
I thought my voice stole. Now I watch it give.
And I’m beginning to understand that maybe it always could. I speak with a confidence I didn’t have before. Not because I think I’m always right, but because I no longer begin with the assumption that I must be wrong.
—
That doesn’t mean life is easier.
Actually, it’s much lonelier circumstantially. There are days I look around at the physical reality of my life and feel a deep sadness. Sometimes the quiet is very quiet.
And in those moments, I can feel the temptation to confuse loneliness with having made the wrong choice. Going backward would make the room less empty. But I know where I’d be standing in it. Back in the corner, on the treadmill. Running. Explaining. Trying to earn my way into connections that required me to leave myself behind.
So I choose the quiet.
I stay with myself.
—
I’ve watched a lot of brilliant women keep running.
Thoughtful, self-aware women searching for another version of the sentence. I recognize that exhaustion. I wore that treadmill out.
There’s no three-step process for getting off of it. But I wish someone had told me this sooner: sometimes, when you’ve spent years trying to communicate better and still feel like you’re screaming into a void, the problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right words.
Sometimes your voice is being spent in places that were never willing or able to receive it.
Your voice might not be the problem. Your setting might be.
The answer isn’t to stop speaking. It’s to stop spending your whole voice trying to convince someone to hear the first sentence.
—
For years, I thought I needed to learn how to run better.
I didn’t know I needed different ground beneath my feet.
I’m still me. The stride is the same. But without all that resistance, I look around and realize how far I’m moving.
I still struggle to use my voice sometimes, even here. Writing about those years takes courage, and sometimes it brings me right back. I can still hear it. You aren’t allowed to feel that. You aren’t allowed to say that. For a moment, I want to make the words smaller again.
But then I look around at the rooms this walkway has carried me into. Rooms full of women using their voices. Women who remind me that having an experience, feeling it, and speaking about it isn’t an attack on anyone.
So I keep speaking. Not because I’m fearless. Because maybe one day my voice will be the one another woman hears while she’s still on the treadmill. Maybe something I say will make her stop for a second and wonder whether her exhaustion really proves she needs to try harder. Maybe she’ll look around and realize there are other places to stand.
—
Maybe one day the room will get fuller again.
In my home. On a Sunday morning. I don’t know yet. But for now, I’m going to let this walkway take me there.
—
Funny enough, I used to hate the sound of my own voice.
Now I lean in to listen.
I’m learning a lot from her.
