Sometimes you look back at the weird little spurts of creative combustion you’ve had across a lifetime and realize they weren’t random phases at all—they were breadcrumbs leading you right here.
I think about my early twenties, when I was lugging gear into sticky-floored bars and swapping instruments like a guy trying on different skins, bass guitar for the pulse, six-string acoustic for the confessionals, writing songs in cramped apartments where the neighbors definitely heard every failed lyric before I found a keeper.
Back then I thought I was searching for my sound when really I was just practicing being myself in public. Later it morphed into making websites—first for me, then for anyone who needed one—these little digital houses built from caffeine and stubbornness. And then I made some music videos to some of my songs.., all grit and improvisation, me trying to stitch mood and storylines into pixels.
But the funny thing about the creative path is that it loops, not climbs. You don’t ascend into some enlightened, upgraded “final version.” You just circle back to an older version of yourself with a little more mileage and realize the voice you’ve been trying to polish into something has actually been sitting in the passenger seat the whole damn time, waiting for you to stop overthinking and hand it the wheel.
Now I write books with a weird Zen calm, like a monk switching mediums not out of boredom but out of instinct, except my monastery is a messy desk and a head full of half-finished lines. And in my older age—if we’re calling it that—I’m finally comfortable enough to say the thing out loud: my author voice is just how I talk. Raw, crooked, amused by the absurdity of being human.
It took me decades to realize that the voice I kept searching for like some lost artifact was actually welded into me from the start. So yeah, sometimes your “voice” isn’t something you discover. It’s something you finally stop ignoring.
