#Reverb14 Day 5

What is the sound of your own voice?

When I was younger, a friend’s mother told me I sounded “like Minnie Mouse.” To this day, I associate the sound of my recorded voice as being “like Minnie Mouse.” But that’s beside the point — when I read this prompt, I didn’t think of my literal voice anyway. I thought of how I felt like my voice — my writing — has been silenced, choked out by emotional and psychological trauma suffered for a year and a half of my life. Without dwelling on that same painful past, I’m incredibly desperate to regain my voice and make it heard once again.

My voice had been weak at first, floundering for the right words to attract an audience. Some days I felt like I was simply changing the medium from a locked diary to an anonymous page in the annals of the world wide web. And then I began to find a soft yet firm voice, speaking out for a specific group of women, culminating in my readership surge in November 2009 with the posting of my HBA2C story. Then I began the journey into Reverb, beginning with the Best09 series that December. My voice seemed to boom loudly, or so the statcounter said. 2010 was my best year to date. Then a series of events lead me down a new path — and things began to soften. I’ve slowly but surely been losing my voice, but I’ve been suffering from the writer’s version of laryngitis for much of 2014. In August I started to clear my throat with the help of Kat’s August Moon prompts. I even managed to channel inspiration with my September Equinox prompts.

Now, I feel like I’ve been floundering with my Cultivate series. I branched off of Reverb in 2012 because I felt called to the word “cultivate.” I felt like I was competing with several Reverbs in December 2012, though, and felt drowned out by the sheer numbers of people searching “reverb” while skipping over “cultivate.” In 2013, Kat and I co-conspired August Moon’s inception, and it was while working with her that I decided I wanted to leave room for Reverb — and hook my audience for January. It went over… like a whisper this year. I don’t know if writers were burnt out or if my line-up of guest prompts didn’t suit the readership. Still, I feel like my life’s circumstances hindered my ability to promote properly, that perhaps I just need to give next month a shot. If for whatever reason Cultivate 2015 doesn’t pan out for January, I can always dusted it off, polish it up, and deliver it in June. Maybe we need our Solstices for motivation. I won’t be discouraged. I will project my voice, and I will find my way once more.