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How to Find Your Voice as an Introvert?
Disclaimer: I’m not sure you ever do…
I have what they call a perfectionist streak. Or maybe it’s not called that. I’m not a native English speaker. I’m not a speaker at all…
Everyone talks about finding their voice
And yet I struggle even with vocabulary and grammar. On top of that, I have years of brain fog plaguing me. How do I even begin to pour my soul and everything out on these pages?
I don’t have to do this. I know I don’t. But I want to. What am I trying to accomplish, you might ask? Why shouldn’t I just get a PhD and write dry and academic prose with the help of Deepl and publish it in some mediocre journal?
What is it that ties me to this arduous, seemingly impossible task of reading and imitating the very best writing styles out there, to start thinking and dreaming and divining the essence of a style not yet refined but bursting with energy, and finally expressing myself in that style? It’s self expression, as much as I hate that idea…
You can’t express your soul just like that…
You have to imitate first. There is no way around it. In painting, you have to perfect the technique before you dare to break it. Anything else is immediately recognized as amateur and wannabe.
It’s a bit like recognizing a text generated by an AI, only the other way around — the uncanny valley of trying too hard to mix and tweak the style of the best. Hemingway mixed with Faulkner, infused with my own suffering, please.
Now, what actually is style? What does it mean to find your own voice? This is a topic that really scares me, because I’ve always been the quiet type.
Can you find your own voice as an introvert?
Of course you can, I hear you say. But can you really? Introversion was once pathologized. Shy, withdrawn, caught up in themselves. These people had to be turned outwards in order to make them conform, to make them transparent so that they could function and be useful to an increasingly extroverted society.
