Finding voice…It’s a funny phrase; find your voice… most of us are born with our vocal cords intact as infants, and even when we don’t know how to speak yet, we make ourselves heard with our voice…
Of course, then the adult life has a totally different meaning to ‘having a voice’. It is especially important for girls to have their voice, all the social and patriarchal conditioning force girls lose their voice from an early age, or not to use it at all… “Good girls don’t speak loudly” they say… “No one marries a girl who speaks her mind” they say… “a lady doesn’t argue with men” they say… And there you go; in the smack middle of our adulthood, we find ourselves in a place where we don’t even know who we are and what we want anymore. And if we know what we want, we don’t voice it out loud, and we don’t know how to pursue that without walking on eggshells. If we see injustice being done to us, we don’t voice our fight for justice.
These past few weeks have been a knockout setback for women’s rights and equality. What is with the Taliban taking over beautiful Afghanistan and abusing women and doing everything possible to make them invisible, turn them into silent, childbearing furniture at home as we speak. Women losing their rights to their own body in Texas with abortion law banning abortion for unwanted or unhealthy pregnancies, even if the girl is a child or raped, sometimes by their own family members, the law which sentence them for lifetime of trauma and torment…
But we can’t and shall not put up with that. If the patriarchy is prevailing and intensifying its grip on controlling women around the world, it is not because they are right! It is because they are wrong, and they know it very well that they are in the wrong. Because they know it very well that a woman with a VOICE is powerful, a woman who speaks her mind and does not stay silent in the face of injustice is invincible. So, find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, use it until you are heard, until you get to the purpose of your soul.