Who’s Going to Tell You that You’ve Finally come Home

All my life there have been lyrics that proceeded me.

By that I mean I’d hear them and they’d hit me and take hold, but I didn’t yet know why.  I hadn’t lived it yet.

Do you know what I mean?

Its happened so many times, as though they were foreseeing my life path and wanted to seep into my bones for when I needed those lyrics.

These were one of them.  That felt like I needed them before I knew why.

 

“When the voice that is talking is never your own.  Then who’s going to tell you that you’ve finally come home”.

-Ferron

From the song Never Your Own, that you can listen to here.

 

Those two sentences latched onto me.  Telling me “Your voice isn’t your own Viv and you’ve got to find a way to that place”.

And it was right. My voice, even my identity was infused with other peoples voices of things real and perceived.

I didn’t believe in myself and in my own worth.

I wasn’t home in myself and I knew it.

But the idea of finding your way home to yourself sounds a lot romantic than the reality I was feeling was.

It was terrifying.

 

But I knew that the song lyric was so right.

That I was going to keep trying on different aspects of myself, none of them ever feeling quite like a fit.

That I wasn’t going to feel like I fit in or that things were truly a right-fit for me

 

I needed to find a place to land, somewhere to begin.

Finding home in myself wasn’t going to happen instantaneously.

I needed to cultivate my voice again until it found its own resonance.

Until I could recognize it as my own.

Coming home to yourself isn’t always that pretty, or it wasn’t for me.

It was grief and feeling lost.

 

I didn’t plan out that photography and taking self-portraits would be my guides.

In fact that was the last place I would have expected to.

And it wasn’t in photographing other people (though that sure is fun).

I started to see glimpse of the resonance of my own voice, of a place that is home in my

As I would put down the camera, set the timer and let go.

 

That is where I found it, my own voice.

It was in the quiet.

In those moments after the timer stops and the shutter clicks.

Where all the other voices fall away and there is some sort of quiet that is mine alone.

I didn’t expect to be there, in fact I expected a lions roar of self-critic, of those old voices that were never mine

Telling me how to move my body, to stop moving, to be quiet, to be different.

But they weren’t there.  There weren’t allowed there.

There it was, my voice, awaiting me in the quiet.

My own resonance.

 

I could have missed it. Walked by it.  Assumed that it wasn’t there.

Especially with so much shouting in its way.

But it was there, past the inner critic.  Past the self-doubt.  Past the hurt.  It was there.

The voice that was my own.

 

I wanted to share this with you in case you feel like you are still searching.  In case you can’t see past the hurt.

In case it feels like you are living listening to other people’s voices everyday.

Its hard to put to words even now, finding my own voice.

 

I would have thought that finding home would be louder, would be more dramatic.

But it wasn’t, it isn’t.  It was beautifully simple to finally arrive home.

There was no map.

There is no box I can put that resonance of home in.

There is no true guidebook to finding your voice.

There was just trusting the unknown and going out to seek it.

I can’t tell you what it looks like, what it sounds like.

But I can tell you this.

It does indeed someday say.  You’ve finally come home.