the mad voice part 1

Readers over the past couple weeks will have observed me sinking into swamps of insecurity as I've contemplated the crossroads where I find myself. The Mad Studies PhD proposal has gone nowhere and instead I find myself staring at life's chessboard, pondering the endgame to my career (such as it is). My preoccupation with voice has much to do with this.

When I experienced madness, it was a many-layered, many-textured experience. It combined a pre-Me-Too feminist awakening; a spiritual reckoning between my Catholic upbringing and my agnostic tendencies; a climate-crisis induced attack of paralysing grief for the damage we wreak on our world; not to mention the menopause wreaking chaos upon me body and soul. It was so many experiences all at once that I find it pretty insulting actually to be told that it was no more than a bipolar episode.

But possibly more than any of these, it was a crisis of voice. My voice when it finally reached out was so immersed in pain that it was unhinged, mad. And burning with truth.

Voice is our contribution to this world, our gift and our message and our story to tell. When I suffer from lack of voice, it means that I'm not bringing my whole self into the game, I'm holding it back, trying to stay safe. However

… like so many fairy-tale heroines, we are forced to endlessly repeat the experience of being lost in the dark woods and having to find our way home. This isn't a cyclical process... it's very much more like a spiral. We might seem to be circling back around, but we never find ourselves back in exactly the same place in which we began. (Sharon Blackie, Hagitude)

So while I feel like I've been here before - and struggling with voice my entire life – I agree that here isn't quite the same place as it was those times before. With age and experience, I've earned my place among those women with hagitude, the ones who possess

a comfort with the unique power they embody; a strong sense of who they are and what they have to offer the world; a strong belief in their necessary place in the ever-shifting web of life.

This informs where I need to go next, in regards to the crossroads. That burning truth of a mad voice wasn't mine alone, it is shared by all those who step over the edge and let go of the railings. The remainder of my career (such as it is) must be dedicated to finding ways to make the mad voice heard. And that's where I'm at with it, today.

(Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash)