Inside Voice, Outside Voice

Understanding Right Speech

Ollie’s a big dog. At barely two years old, he’s nearly as tall, on his back feet, as a short human. He’s been traveling with his pupper mom and dad in their RV for a good long while. He takes up a lot of space.

Ollie’s pupper daddy is my social media expert, JC Spears.

JC called me out of the blue yesterday morning to announce he’d be driving from Portland to Eugene, and was I taking visitors? Are you kidding? Like my buddy Rosennab I am having a rough time being isolated from folks, being in a brand new city. About the only buddy I have around here so far is the guy who loads the broccoli in the produce section at Fred Meyer. It’s lonely sometimes, although I am actively working on that.

JC and his love Lisa showed up late in the afternoon with Ollie in tow. Ollie and I had already met two weeks ago. He’s a great goof of a dog, with a love of squirrels (natch). He was in heaven, placing his huge soft paws on my deck railing to inspect the nearby trees for intruders.

Right about the time that JC and I were fully engaged in a discussion about how to choose an RV, Ollie saw my trio of visiting turkey bachelors.

Here came that Outside Voice.

I’ve always been slightly shocked at the level of volume that a dog can muster. At least this time we were outside. When I first met Ollie, we were all inside JC’s van in Portland. Ollie had perched himself next to me on the bench so that I could scrub his chest. His muzzle was right next to my left ear.

You know what happened.

As I covered my shattered left eardrum, JC said sharply,

OLLIE! INSIDE VOICE!

Chastised, Ollie calmed. Okay, for about ten seconds.

Here on my outside deck, Ollie’s Outside Voice startled the Terrible Turkey Trio. However I headed to the kitchen sliding door, a sound they have learned to rush towards twice a day, and soothed them with boooosssshhhh, booooossssh. That’s an Ethiopian rider’s calming word when he’s slowing his running, agitated horse.

It’s remarkable what handy things you pick up while traveling. The Toms came running. Inside, JC held Ollie by the collar, and continued to command him to use his Inside Voice.

For Ollie, and any very large dog who shares a small space with humans, the Inside Voice has to be quiet and respectful. For humans, it’s the other way around. That Inside Voice is where you and I can safely express anger, hurt, pain, agony and despair. By doing this in private, we are far better able to focus our Outside Voices to do good in the world.

Let me say that again in case you missed it:

The Inside Voice, for humans, is the opposite of the Inside Voice for our pets.

Our Inside Voice is for private screaming. The Outside Voice, in an ideal world, has the potential to help, heal, and soothe.

In that way that JC and my Medium peeps often provide me with a Big Life Insight, at times without meaning to, that command made me think. When combined with his strong and very correct recommendation that I stop writing reactively, and write ONLY in my primary lanes, the terms Inside and Outside Voices take on new meanings.

Here’s where I’m going with this.

Back in May 2018, my ex BF moved in with me. After forty-eight years- nearly five decades- of keeping a journal, I lost my voice. The experience was so nasty, so ugly, that I stopped writing in my journal.

That journal was the one safe place where I could rant, rail, bitch, moan, complain and get the poison out of my system, as Ann Litts wrote the other day.

My journal was my sanity. I lost a bit of it, as I forfeited that Voice. I lost the sense of safety in my own house, being reduced to hiding on the floor of my gear room to escape his moods, his words, his isolating ugliness. This man that I had adored and lionized for a decade turned out to be a brutally abusive piece of shite, and I let him in my sacred space. I ended up, quite literally, unable to write my truth in private.

What happened, which is what I see online here on Medium and all over the Internet, is that I turned to Medium to express what used to be written only in my journal. Kindly, what only belongs in my journal. That’s a journal’s job.

Not on Medium, at least for me.

Now look. To a degree that can be useful. You can write out your poison, but the larger question is whether in doing so publicly we are adding value to people’s lives or adding further poison and pain to theirs? Is the Inside Voice, the private one which is only for us to express and assess, the right one to share with the world?

I can’t speak for you. But along with his correct observation that I needed to stop writing reactively, JC also offered this opinion:

My journal is where I get to say all those things that I need to say that don’t need to hurt my brand online. Where I can bitch and whine and moan and fling shite, but where nobody gets hurt. Nobody’s eardrums get shattered the way Ollie’s Outside Voice hurt mine. It’s private, and being private, I also get to work out the words that are better-suited for public consumption.

I allowed my ex to rob me of that Voice. Nearly five decades of my journal. I haven’t written a single paragraph since May 2018.

Since I must write, and it’s not an option, I wrote too much of what likely should have been an Inside journal entry when I reacted to other people’s stuff online. That not only didn’t really help my brand, but it also scattered my energies far and wide.

Writing is cathartic, and monumentally healing. That is, if we are mindful of where and when and to whom we write, and why. If you and I bark out what likely would be our Inside Voices online, and hurt others because we hurt, we spread the damage.

It’s like poking fingers into one another’s rotten teeth. It hurts.

While I most certainly understand and empathize with the need to relieve the pain, the key lesson I took away from Ollie’s woofing in my ear- which felt good to him but not to me- is that there really is an Inside (private)Voice and an Outside (public) Voice for us as writers.

I wrote a triple prize-winning book on word use. However, like anyone else, life sometimes delivers body blows, and despite my best intentions, I have allowed my personal pain and hurt infect what I write online. If such things didn’t happen I’d learn nothing about how difficult it is for all of us to stay on the high road.

That high road, for me, is expressed here, from Thich Nhat Hahn’s lovely book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, on Right Speech, from The Fourth Mindfulness Training:

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and deep listening in order to bring joy and happiness to others and relieve others of their suffering. Knowing that words can create happiness or suffering, I am determined to speak truthfully, with words that inspire self-confidence, joy and hope. I will not spread news that I do not know to be certain and will not criticize or condemn things of which I am not sure. I will refrain from uttering words that can cause division or discord, or that can cause family or the community to break. I am determined to make all efforts to reconcile and resolve conflicts, however small. (author bolded)

I would posit that if we held up the whole of Medium’s articles to this standard, frankly, a shitton of them would fail. Along with plenty of mine.

To say nothing of Trump, our media, our friends and just about everything else. We really are a bit irresponsible with our Inside Voices, it seems.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I am done with expressing my Inside Voice online where it doesn’t do anyone any good. Worse, I may have caused harm.

I have no business whatsoever making anyone else suffer along with me. That’s my private work to do.

However, I would make one very big exception to this rule: the Inside Voices of POC, whose Outside Voices have been suppressed for far too long. Their Inside Voices have for me this year not only been hugely instructive but critically important to expanding my world. However, there is one proviso: their intentions. What I receive when I read Marley K. and Sharon Hurley Hall and Jeanette C. Espinoza and Rebecca Stevens A. 🦋 and all my other Black female friends is their truth. That it’s painful isn’t their problem. That we haven’t listened is OUR problem. That’s very different from struggle porn and forcing others to suffer through poor writing and bitching on line. The way I hear them, they want us to listen, understand, be educated and take social action. That’s very different from simply laying out our complaints that God didn’t wake up this morning with the single purpose to make us happy.

This week JC helped me set my Journal files up on my laptop. As with all things moving, I still live with huge piles all over my house. However, even though that BF made the strategic error of reaching out to me recently, I am focused on moving forward. Healing.

Part of healing is minding what I do, and in minding what I do, I am restarting my journal this week. Thirty months without a journal, with all the critical value that used to give me.

I am taking it back. It’s not just that it’s a power statement. I followed JC’s advice about not writing reactively. The result?

My curation rate has leapt. In just one week, I’ve seen the curation rate triple.

The second was that suddenly I noticed how many Medium headlines are pure clickbait. How much of it I might have leapt on, allowing my need to release outrage derail me into railing about something that was utterly useless in the larger picture. That energy is far better served by my Inside Voice, where whatever poison I might be carrying, and there’s a lot of it out there these days, can safely be released, and nobody else gets hurt in the process.

The more I attend to using my Outside Voice to serve my purpose rather than air my grievances or the poison that my pen needs to release through my Inside Voice, the more I get curated.

And the more value I add.

I can’t speak for other Medium writers, but I am here to make a positive difference.

I can’t do that by disseminating my personal poison. That’s an Inside job, so that my Outside Voice does the work I came here to do.

With a nod to my other witchy friend Ann Litts who knows something about Voices.