Keeping Your Own Voice

Keep Your Own Voice is a reminder we need to decide what is ours before we say it back.

Every day, a crowd of voices offers a view on what to repeat, reward, fear, and become. Most of them mean well but most mean nothing at all. They are numerous, they are loud, and some of what they say is right.

The trouble is where a borrowed opinion ends up. We hear a take in the morning, see it twice more by lunch, and by evening we are saying it to a friend, with our own conviction, and no memory of having decided anything.

That is what an echo is. An echo has no words of its own. It gives back what reached it, a little softer, and it sounds sure of itself the whole time.

Keep Your Own Voice is a reminder to put one step between hearing a thing and saying it. We should listen widely. Question it. Decide honestly whether we believe it. Then say it back, if we still want to, as something we chose.

Listening widely matters as much as the deciding. A voice that has only heard one side is fragile, because it has never had to hold up against anything.

Deciding honestly is the hard part. Sometimes it means finding that we agree with the crowd and saying so plainly. Reflexive disagreement is its own kind of echo: it still takes its cue from what everyone else said and simply reverses it.

It also means being willing to say, "I don't know yet." The crowd almost never produces that sentence, and it is often the most honest one available.

We shouldn't give the echo the final word. The echo gets plenty of words. It can have the first ones. On anything that matters, the last one should be ours.