The "Songbirds" Issue

Have you ever had your voice muted or silenced because of rules of convention or what you say might discomfit someone? I vividly remember the first time it happened to me. I was about 12 years old, and I said something in a very public setting (church, for God’s sake!) that embarrassed my grandmother. I still have a mental cringe when I remember her lecture, how ashamed and belittled it made me feel. In my family, being “nice,” or more important, appearing to be nice, was paramount, and the fact that the incident still bothers me tells you how much of an impact it had on me. I think I lost my voice that day, and a big part of my own personal journey has been a quest to regain it. The pressure not to make other people uncomfortable is always weighing on me–– it’s like being a perpetual host at an exhaustingly eternal dinner party. I know I should be past it, but even now, when something I write offends someone, I feel the specter of my prim, prudish Protestant grandmother coming back to haunt me. The shame is still as immediate and intense as it was when I was 12, but now it also makes me angry. Because even today, when women have made so many giant strides toward equality, we are still susceptible to losing our muse and our music. The volume gets turned down when we’re in middle school and we want to be popular. The volume gets turned down when we run for office and we don’t want to seem power hungry. And the volume gets turned down when we care more about what other people think of us than about who we want to be. Every time someone calls Hillary a bitch or criticizes Michelle Obama for speaking her mind or compliments Nancy Pelosi for dressing in a feminine way, the sound has been turned off for all of us. I’m going to keep fighting for my voice to be heard—I hope you do, too.