I am not talking about my voice in the physical sense, though some would probably like it if I actually did but that is a discussion for a different day.

I am talking about “the voice” in my writing.

I have struggled over the last several months to find something to post about. Over that time, I have recycled writing I did in the past but that I thought was worth visiting again. It seems I have just tried to keep the blog afloat on topics that were on my on my radar at the time it was written. I have started and deleted so many posts, mostly based on current events and my take on them.

When I was teaching I was having conversations about these things on a daily basis with my students and the conversations were worth rehashing in another forum, collecting my thoughts from the conversations and things students were thinking and then writing about that. It worked for me because it was something thrived on.

Now, well, those conversations just aren’t happening and I feel like the lack of conversation has finally caught up with me. I have lost my voice. It isn’t that I don’t have things to say, I just don’t have the ability to express them in a way that I have in the past and it is confounding me.

Or, maybe I am just overthinking it and caring too much about what I put out there. I have always struggled with a balance between putting content out there and putting content out that is researched and supported. Sure, I can write opinions all day long but as I always used to tell my students, “No one will care about your opinion unless you can back it up.” Therein lies the challenge for me, just write or write well?

So, I feel like my voice is bottled up. I want to express myself but to what end? Is it just to hear myself or is it to be listened to?

Anyone else dealing with this? Or dealt with it? How do/did you deal with it?