Get Vocal To Find Your Mirrors

“Getting vocal” isn’t about making a scene. It’s not about being loud (I’m actually a pretty quiet person when I’m not rocking out on stages). It’s about finding your mirrors, and getting into alignment. Like I’ve talked about in my first post, Get Vocal The Right Way, your voice is your regulator, communicator and navigator… IN LIFE. That means, you can use your voice and what you “get vocal” about, to find your “mirrors”. The people that value you. That means, when you share something with someone and they choose to devalue you.. THEY AIN’T IT fam.

You can always lend people time to process, but disrespecting someone further when they transparently shared they were trafficked? Come on now. Where is it, that the level of respect you decide to show someone is based on a person’s experiences or birth-abnormalities? We have a problem in this world where: respect is shown less to the people who have endured the worst experiences. (Literally makes no sense, we are VETERANS). And while I know this is instinctive human response, there is always a choice: you can choose to honor one’s dignity, or attempt to put that person in a box of their experiences or birth abnormalities and disrespect them. 

People do not belong in boxes, in cages, locked up behind fences or doors, in any way shape or form. When this is done to a person, they are stripped of their dignity. Which is why getting vocal will show you pretty immediately who has respect for you or not. It brings you clarity, even if you make some mistakes along the way. Speaking as the 30-year-old-naively-awakened-child-abuse/suppressed-memory-survivor, the past couple years? No idea what I’m doing. It is like waking up from a terrible dream and the blank space? Entirely intimidating but liberating at the same time. Most days I feel like I’m 10 years old, learning color theory trying to comprehend that there’s no wrong way of coloring, so long as I like what I create. 

So in considering this concept: creation. We’re here to create, point-blank, period. And your voice will create every single in your life, here’s how. I write about this in that first blog post as well, about how your voice is an instrument designed to create. Just like God saying, in Genesis, “Let us make man in our image…” and then later seeing everything he had made, “saw that it was good” — we do this with our voices every day. Which is why the language we use is so important in shaping our worlds. What we say on the inside, whether shared with others or not, is created in the external. Which is why also, when you suppress your voice? You suppress your life. 

Stop suppressing. Most likely you’re trying to hold in big emotions — they need breath, movement, time and energy, just like you do. Holding it all in just cripples you over time — trust me, it’s NOT worth it. Getting vocal frees you from the suppressing weight and simultaneously helps with finding your “mirrors”. No one can make you share, but people can help you throw off the weight from your experience.

That’s how trauma is actually healed — it’s a collective effort to throw off the heavy weight. And if you want your trauma to die? Get vocal, on a hill for everyone to witness. Trauma is not meant to be locked up in a box, in the closet or swept under the rug. Trauma itself, should die on a hill with a cloud of witnesses taking a knee in reverence for the loss, the pain and injustice endured. Not everyone will respect you, but the ones who get it? They will, and their validation and encouragement will open up a pathway for you to find deep, foundational respect for yourself. Trust me on that one. 

See how you can choose which way things will go and determine that with your voice? I hope so. 

The other factor to consider in all this is love. If you love yourself, why wouldn’t you speak up and get vocal? Why wouldn’t you share about what hurt you? 

Because what love really is? It’s an action of exchange. 

I understood this after I sold a mirror in the summer of 2020, to a woman who lived about 30 minutes away. I drove to her, to make 10 bucks. Made absolutely no logical sense aside from the fact that I was working as a caretaker at the time and my client loved car rides. So we drove over to this woman’s house and I sold her this mirror and we both felt some divine stardust in the air during the exchange — an essence of neighborly love. 

Selling that mirror allowed me to stand in front of larger mirrors (I was moving). Buying that mirror allowed this woman to see herself within a new frame. New frames (mirrors, glasses, or pictures) are a form of new life — transformation.

Love is an exchange leading to transformation. 

An exchange of false core beliefs for true core beliefs.

An exchange of negative self-talk for positive self-talk. 

An exchange of irritability for patience. 

An exchange of hatred for understanding.

An exchange of reactively hurting others, whether consciously or ignorantly, for intentional awareness to be kind in response.

An exchange of tending to and letting go of the wrongs done to you, for good to bloom from each slight or assault. 

An exchange, that doesn’t really make all too much sense in terms of worldly profit.  

After I left her house, we continued to communicate and engage, although sparsely, from that divine exchange of neighborly love we found with one another. 

I can’t remember who started it, but this woman has always encouraged me and spoken words of life into my life. It’s nothing regular. Nothing scheduled. Just whenever I or she comes to the mind of the other, a short message is sent with the essence of our stardust, of our light. 

This exchange was one of the seeds of my work as a holistic voice coach, because that exchange spoke life into one another’s lives. A cash sale (ironically over a mirror) says: “you are worthy” and, “you have value to be seen”. And experienced. When these kind of seeds get planted in our souls, it’s so gentle, you don’t even know that it is a concept that will bloom later in your life.. so long as you make room for it. That requires letting go of what does not serve you. If you never use your voice to do so — well, it gets a bit claustrophobic, doesn’t it? Stuffy? It gets exhausting too. 

I know I didn’t like that feeling — of being “full”. And while it’s unfortunate that I was nearly programmed this way, walking through life like a garbage compactor for everyone else, I unlearned it. It’s possible. Cause you know what did the trick? Getting vocal. In front of giant mirrors, living alone with my hilarious kinked-tail cat for 3 years, in a pretty sad apartment. Speaking all the things out so that the puzzle pieces finally fit. If you’re like me, having developed C-PTSD from your childhood — you know yourself — it doesn’t add up. Until it does. Count on that. 

Cause the thing about being in a sad apartment for that long, stuck with only yourself and all the things that you don’t like about your life is, you eventually see that the only shred of light in that space is what’s staring you right back in the mirror. (And maybe your hilarious siamese-bengal furry friend.)

All this to say, if you are looking into a mirror and can only see a dirty, damaged, worthless reflection of yourself?

Let go of that mirror, or the things clouding your vision from the past. Let someone else shine a different reflection into it. 

See if there is a more suitable exchange of love for you. For them. For everyone that can pass by and take a glimpse at the reflection. 

To let go means to feel. 

Let yourself feel, and you’ll let yourself heal.

-B