I Will Not Lose My Voice Again

I Will Not Lose My Voice Again

I have been told “FU.”

I have been told to give up.

I have been told that my thoughts are empty.

And now I have been told that I am verbally abusive because I shared an image with a quote about knowing you can survive through struggles.

I am not going to sugarcoat how that feels.

It hurts. It makes me angry. And some days it makes me wonder how people can look at something meant to encourage someone who is struggling and turn it into an attack.

But I am not giving up.

And I am definitely not going to accept being called verbally abusive for sharing a message about surviving difficult things.

I care about people deeply. That is one of the biggest reasons PTSD & Surviving exists.

But caring about people does not mean I am going to allow people to come onto my page and verbally attack me.

If you come onto my page throwing ugly words at me, I will block you.

If Facebook automatically hides your comment because of the language you chose to use, I am not going to rush to make sure everyone gets a chance to read it.

I am not obligated to provide a platform for someone to mistreat me.

That is called a boundary.

And after everything I have been through, I have finally learned that I am allowed to have them.

What makes some of these comments even harder to understand is being told, in one way or another, that I must not know what struggle is.

If only people knew.

If you had walked even one mile through the first twenty-something years of my life, you might understand why those words hit differently.

I know struggle.

I know what it is like to survive things you should never have had to survive.

I know what it is like to lose your voice.

I know what it is like to have people tell you what you cannot do, what you should not do, who you should be, and how much of yourself you are allowed to show.

I heard versions of those messages for most of my life.

You can’t do this.

You shouldn’t do that.

Be quiet.

Don’t say anything.

Don’t make people uncomfortable.

And for a long time, those voices had power over me.

They do not anymore.

I am in my 50s now, and I have grown more than I sometimes stop long enough to realize.

I am still growing.

I am still learning.

I still struggle.

But I am no longer the person who believes she has to disappear because somebody else does not like her voice.

I put my heart and soul into PTSD & Surviving.

I could be spending these hours doing a hundred other things.

Instead, I create posts.

I answer people who need encouragement.

I write educational blogs.

I write personal blogs.

I make workbooks.

I am working hard on my memoir.

I am gathering years of my poetry together for a book.

I am taking things that came out of pain and trying to turn them into something that might help another person feel a little less alone.

That matters to me.

And no, everything I share will not be for everyone.

Someone may disagree with me.

Someone may scroll past.

Someone may decide a particular message does not apply to them.

That is okay.

But disagreeing with something does not give anyone permission to attack the person who created it.

I have already spent too much of my life being made to feel like my voice should not matter.

I will not do that again.

I will not shut my mouth because someone says something hateful.

I will not lose my voice again because someone tries to make me question whether I should be using it.

And I will not stop doing something I believe has purpose because a handful of people decide to come at me.

My faith is part of this too.

I believe the devil would love nothing more than to take everything I have lived through and convince me that I should stay quiet about it.

That is not going to happen.

After everything I went through, I want my life to mean something.

I want the pain to become something more than pain.

I want what I learned through surviving to reach somebody who may still be standing where I once stood.

So when someone tells me I cannot do this, should not do this, or needs to give up?

Something different happens in me now.

It does not silence me.

It lights a fire.

The more someone tries to convince me that I should stop, the more determined I become to create the next thing.

Another post.

Another page.

Another workbook.

Another chapter.

Another poem.

Another blog.

I am not the same woman I was twenty or thirty years ago.

I have grown.

I have found parts of myself I thought were gone.

And most importantly, I am finding my voice.

I fought too hard to get it back.

I am not giving it away again.