Discover Your Creative Voice, with Roxane Gay

(light music) Headspace Studio. Hi, everyone. I'm Roxane Gay, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace, and welcome to Tuesday. If you listened yesterday, then you know this week, we're exploring the power of creative expression. And today, I'd like to discuss how to find and nurture your creative voice, because in doing so, it will be much easier for you to communicate your ideas and to make the things you love most. One of the questions that I am asked most regularly is, how do I find my voice? Where is my voice? How do I use my voice? And the reality is that you don't need to find your voice necessarily. It's there. You already have a voice. It's a question of giving yourself permission to use it and then trusting yourself to use it. And that can be really challenging. One of the best ways to use your voice is to try, is to practice. Writing, creativity, communicating of all kinds, these are muscles, and all muscles need to be worked out at some point. They need to stay limber. And the best way to do that is actually by doing. Oftentimes, people will get in their own way and complicate things unnecessarily, or they'll think too much about audience. And I will ask them, what are you really trying to say here? And they'll tell me what they're trying to say, and that's exactly their voice right there. And so you really just have to recognize that your voice is who you are, how you think, how you understand the world. I've always known I wanted to be a writer. And like most people who wanna be writers, I never imagined that I could be a writer full time. And the thing that was key for me in my journey as a writer is that whether I was four or 14 or 44, I always took myself seriously as a writer. I did it regularly. I did it every day, even. And I think it was more a series of moments that let me know that I was finding my voice and really figuring out how to use it to the best effect. But one of the key moments was when I published an essay in I think 2009 called "The Careless Language of Sexual Violence." It was the really the first essay of mine that found a large audience. And it was an essay where I said exactly what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it. And of course, there are flaws in that essay. There are flaws in everything, but I just knew that that's what I wanted to say. And I trusted myself, and I wrote it in a fury because of the incident that inspired the essay. And it was out in the world and people were reading and connecting with it, and it was encouraging conversation, I really felt like, oh wow, that's what figuring...