A Voice Lost and Then Found

Searching for the courage to be seen and heard

When I was ten years old, I discovered that I was invisible.

My mother, the reclusive alcoholic

My mother would linger for hours on the far end of our upholstered living room couch, drinking enormous amounts of wine while losing herself in a constant series of romance novels. She sat in the same place for so long that she wore a hole in the cushion.

I was frequently summoned from my bedroom in the basement to retrieve a fresh bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the refrigerator. This was before twist-off caps were invented, so I taught myself to remove the cork with an ordinary corkscrew.

I delivered the large bottle of wine (she preferred the jumbo size) and set it on the end table beside her. She didn’t say anything — she just continued to read. I was truly invisible.

Nobody is invisible — we all have unfathomable value

To this day, whenever I am at a restaurant, and the server refills my water glass (not surprisingly, I don’t drink), I always say something nice. One of my missions in life is to make people as visible as possible.

I don’t have many memories of a sober mother. Only an angry, lonely, and severely depressed mother. She was an alcoholic.

My angry, emotionally distant father

My father, although not an alcoholic, was a workaholic.

When he returned home from work late at night, he would ignore my mother and me. After changing his clothes, he would head straight to his study or darkroom. No words were exchanged. The only sign of my father in the evening was his briefcase next to the front door.

Again, conclusive evidence that I was invisible.

Two strikes against me — mother and father confirm I am invisible. Three strikes and you’re out, right?

I never struck out because I was so hurt and furious that I just walked away from home plate. I pretended that there wasn’t even a game being played. I wouldn’t return for 15 years.

If you’re invisible, you don’t have a voice

In my child’s brain, if I was invisible, then I didn’t exist. By extension, I didn’t have a voice, or at least not one that mattered. It took a therapist for me to recognize my invisibility as a legitimate traumatic experience.

To prevent dramatic outbursts from my alcoholic mother, I stayed in my bedroom, my refuge, as often as I could. I learned to be on the lookout for anything that would threaten either of my parents. One of those things was writing.

Why my Voice went into hiding

My mother pitied herself openly for not being the writer she thought she deserved to be. My father battled dyslexia and probably ADHD as a kid and found writing, poetry, and literature to be a complete waste of time.

You don’t talk about writing or share your writing with someone who you suspect will be shamed and will retaliate.

What mattered to my father were photography, amateur radio, and sailing. Ah, sailing! That should have been a great way to connect on weekends. No, it wasn’t.

Sailing

I or one of my two brothers accompanied my father to a marina in Holland, Michigan, during the summer. Holland is on Lake Michigan, and sailors from throughout southwest Michigan and northern Illinois would flock there on weekends.

When we boarded his 21-foot Oday DaySailer, I was instructed to sit opposite him to keep the boat balanced. And there I remained.

You might think that he would have used that time together to show me the fundamentals of sailing. Nope. I was just ballast. Invisible ballast.

I learned how to sail via observational learning. But I didn’t actually sail myself until I joined the Navy in my early twenties. I might not have had any instruction from my father, but I did know how to teach myself.

Lessons that invisibility taught me

Be quiet.

Don’t rock the boat (literally and figuratively).

Don’t mention my mother’s drinking, her depression, her anger, or her dreams.

My voice could make things worse.

My voice, which I will now call My Voice, hibernated for decades.

Becoming visible

So how did My Voice emerge from the den?

One word at a time.

One therapy session at a time.

One long walk at a time.

One remarkable author at a time (Wayne Dyer was the first).

One tear at a time.

I’ll be honest with you — it wasn't until my 66th birthday that I was completely liberated from hibernation. Have you ever been cooped up inside for a very long time, and then finally, you could go outside?

You probably stretched out your arms with your face tilted upward towards the sun and rejoiced. The feeling was glorious.

That’s exactly how I felt on my 66th. I still can’t stop smiling. I wake up every morning feeling fortunate that I didn’t wait until my 76th birthday to venture outside into the world of sunshine and authorship.

Lessons my Voice is teaching me

I am safe.

I have something to add to the conversation.

I have a Voice worth listening to.

My Voice can be a source of inspiration for others.

My Voice is who I am.

I am not invisible and I never have been.

The courage to raise my Voice

The origin of courage

Where did my courage come from? It came from repressed anger. My Voice was raging inside of me — LET ME FREE! I couldn’t stymie that cry any longer. Anger can be a direct conduit to courage.

Anger can be a direct conduit to courage.

If your Voice is raging and you ache to escape whatever is holding It prisoner, then know it’s okay to access that rage and channel it into fierce action.

Escape velocity

Sometimes, only fierce and sustained action provides the necessary fuel to achieve what aerospace engineers call ‘escape velocity.’

Escape velocity is the speed at which a spacecraft can escape the pull of Earth’s gravity. Your anger, rage, and yearnings can help you escape the pull of oppression, self-doubt, and fear.

Sometimes, only fierce action provides the necessary fuel to achieve what aerospace engineers call ‘escape velocity.’

We can be genuinely afraid of our own Voices — they seem so powerful that we fear what they might do. This fear is more commonplace than you think. We are afraid of our own Greatness.

One of the other insights from therapy that has enriched my life was that our imagined fears are almost always hyper-exaggerated and are never realized.

Fear is an insidious pair of handcuffs.

Access the strength of your Voice, grab the keys, and unlock them. Yes, your Voice has had those keys all along.