Your own frequency

I do not believe you have to find your voice. I think you have been carrying it the whole time, and that the actual work is recognising it.

There is a difference. Finding implies a thing you do not yet have. It puts you out on a long road, searching for a version of yourself who is somewhere else. Recognising implies a thing you have always had and have not yet stopped to see. It seats you exactly where you are and asks you to look down.

I have noticed, in the women I sit with most often, that the work is almost always recognition. They have a frequency. They have been broadcasting on it for years. They have, just barely, learned to dismiss it.

She writes long emails in a particular cadence and assumes everyone writes that way.

She listens to a particular kind of music when the day is finally hers and has not realised the music is a clue.

She gravitates, again and again, to a particular kind of conversation. The kind that lasts an hour longer than planned. The kind where one of the two of you eventually cries. The kind that ends, almost always, with the same sentence: I haven't said that out loud before.

That is the frequency. She has been carrying it since she was nine.

Three coordinates

When I do this work with someone, I look for three things. I am not original. I am almost certainly summarising what older voices than mine have already said. But I keep returning to these three because they keep being useful.

One. How you say things. Not the topic — the way. The sentence length. The pauses. The kind of metaphors. The willingness to be direct, or the choice to be tender, or the small Spanish word that arrives in the middle of an English thought. The hand-writing of your speech.

Two. What you cannot stop returning to. The themes that come back. The questions you ask three different conversations into three different shapes. The book you keep buying for other people. The article you have started writing seven times and abandoned.

Three. The feeling people have when they have been with you. Not what they say. What they feel. Some people leave rooms more spacious. Some people leave rooms more electric. Some people leave rooms quieter, like the air inside has been cleaned. Ask the people who love you what the room is like, after.

These three together — the way, the themes, the air — are your frequency. They are not a brand. They are not a niche. They are not a thing you are trying to become. They are the thing you already are, that you have been politely dimming so as not to be too much for any one room.

The work, which is small

The work, in my experience, is not louder. It is more permission.

Permission to write the way you actually write, even if the way you write is slower than the market wants.

Permission to keep returning to the theme you cannot stop returning to, even though everyone has been hinting that you should pick something more strategic.

Permission to leave the rooms you leave the way you actually leave them. Quieter. Slower. With one sentence that took ninety minutes to arrive.

That is the entire work. There is nothing else. The frequency was always there. You only have to stop apologising for it.

A small exercise

If you want a single thing to do this week:

Pick three creative moments from your life when you felt most like yourself. Write them down in any form you like. Read them in one sitting.

Look for the air between them. Not the topic — the air.

That is the frequency.

Welcome home.

— A.C.C.