2025-06-03

I'm observing a great improvement in familiarizing myself with my own voice. In the past few weeks, I have been recording myself, hearing myself through the speakers as I ramble about a lot of things: religion, culture, my issues with my friends (in an attempt to understand how gossip feels like), and other things just to practice my speech. I'm feeling a radical sense of externalization, where I catch myself finding the right words to explain the ideas in my head and distill them into words that I can use to capture that concept and push it into someone's head. Communication used to feel like an ultra-selective activity for me. I mean that to an outsider's perspective, I only talk to the "chosen ones." Since I don't want to waste my time and energy talking to people who might not get the things I say, I deprive myself of the chance to practice to explain myself.

It's been so long before I noticed it. This practice has only proven to be exciting as I am discovering a part of myself that I didn't know was in me. Not in an extraordinary sense, but since I have believed for so long that I can only fully express myself in writing, I never actually gave verbal expression a chance. I just received a help from someone, who has also identified a major issue in my practice: reading aloud dense books. It was a struggle to find the best articulation that I can hear to be engaging because I was recording myself reading a philosophy book. I did switch to Proust's "Swann's Way," and Austen's "Persuasion" as my chosen materials for my session this long weekend. This was such a leap in direction because for weeks, I decided to read materials that I am too familiar with, at least in the sense of content. I thought it could spur a kind of voice that I had always been trying to emulate: an introspective, serious, but warm tone of voice, which is kind of counterintuitive. I cannot practice a voice that I impose on myself without trying to discover what my voice is truly capable of expressing at its basest.

I found my rhythm drastically change. In reading, that is. I still need to work some minor tweaks in extemporaneous speech, which is tied to structuring my thoughts in real time, without premeditation. It is out of the sphere of writing when I have the luxury to get into my message first before I try to express it. In the following days, I am attempting to catch another glimpse of progress. Since I have been ruminating a lot about the way I talk to people, I caught myself in the middle of a project that could use and demonstrate my newfound way of expression. I just hope it sticks and become another useful tool where I can find more avenues to make my vision a lot clearer and more enjoyable. The steps in this process are not falling into place.