Your Voice Cannot Be Found. You Have to Craft It.

Finding your voice is a myth you will never win.

Your voice is not out there, waiting. It is never a treasure hunt.

Sometimes it does feel like finding. But what you’re actually experiencing might be arrival — the moment a craft, built through long and laborious work, finally becomes precisely and recognizably yours.

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We do have voices — as a psychological mechanism, as an inner presence. But your artistic voice is different. It needs to be shaped and formed deliberately.

And here is what most people don’t say:

Your creative voice very likely cannot escape from building on borrowed materials at first. Language that existed before you. Cultural systems that shaped what you consider acceptable, what you find intolerable. The thinkers you loved, the ones you wrestled with, the ones you partially rejected.

I have learned and borrowed from many voices across different fields.

I was deeply moved by the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock. The raw strength in his work sparked something explosive in me — a breaking out of the cultural cage I was conditioned to grow up in. For years, I was also drawn to the philosophical world built by Martin Heidegger — his ideas of Being and our relation to Being as human beings. Yet both figures demonstrated choices I wouldn’t align with.

My disagreement with both of them taught me something about what I actually wanted to say, and who I wanted to say it for.

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This is what crafting actually looked like for me.

Making art that didn’t feel right and starting over.

Spending a year and a half creating a body of artwork for a show. Although it was deeply satisfying, I also felt the work had exhausted my life experience. I needed to stop creating and keep living.

Writing numerous essays that were never meant to be published.

Sitting with pages of words, but struggling with coming up with original thoughts because I didn’t yet know myself enough. My writing could only go as far as my clarity. When I couldn’t think clearly, I had no clear words. I know this now because as my thinking cleared, so did my language. And what I actually felt and thought finally had somewhere to go.

Each stage, each attempt, was an honest expression of who I was at that time.

I kept refining my voice in those moments — not only by writing more, but also by living more. By doing the inner work. By reflecting on what life brought me, challenges, ease, and everything in between. By allowing things to reveal what I was there to learn.

I am sensitive. I moved from being overwhelmed by my own sensitivity to learning to protect it, and then let it direct my attention and expression.

That sensitivity became the material. Not a liability. But the source. And this is what I write from to you right here.

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Your voice is not separate from the life you have chosen to live, the career you have chosen to build, the people you have chosen to have in your life.

Your voice emerges from the deliberate effort to grow through your experiences — all of them.

Crafting your voice, if you are willing, is a prolonged process of shaping your own soul. Because what you communicate is the expression of the deepest and purest part of who you are.

I am not saying this is the only way.

But if you genuinely care about your readers, about your craft, and about what you bring into the world, then your voice is not something to find. It is something to build, slowly, with integrity, over ups and downs.

Life will change you. But your purest intent of expression — the one you built with care — remains.

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