Stepping Away
You may need to stop speaking to find your voice
I was driving when I heard David Whyte say something that stopped me cold:
“The first step to something deeper is stopping the conversation you’re having right now.”
I sat with that for the rest of the drive.
For the past six months I’d gone quiet. Still thinking. But nothing felt ready to say. The voice I’d been writing from no longer felt like mine. It wasn’t just a voice. It was a version of me I’d constructed — curated, future-focused, and overly positive. But I’d quietly outgrown him.
When that happens, an anxious whisper creeps in: Who am I? What am I doing? Where is this going? Have I wasted time?
But I’m starting to see it differently. None of it was wasted. It was part of something.
Stepping away to find something deeper isn’t quitting — if anything it takes more guts than pushing on. Sometimes it’s the only honest move left.
What it requires is admitting something uncomfortable:
The voice I’ve been using is too small for where I’m going.
So you stop. You give it space. You let it dissolve.
Rush back before something has actually shifted and you just rebuild the same thing. Different words, same voice, same problem. The output feels off but you can’t locate why. Because what actually matters hasn’t surfaced yet.
I won’t romanticise it. The last six months were hard. The kind of hard where several things shift at once and none of them are under your control. There were weeks I thought the creative part of me had died — gone forever! For someone who has always counted on that part of themselves, that’s a terrible loss. But the one thing I didn’t do was force my way back. Strange, as I never consciously decided that. I just instinctively let the silence happen.
But I realised — David Whyte describes it as the inner core becoming molten. Not broken in the way we usually mean it. Something older than that. Molten. And in that state you can’t rush anything. You can’t force clarity. You can’t manufacture something honest just to stay visible. You have to wait until something settles into a form that can actually carry the weight of what you’ve been through.
The voice isn’t louder. But clearer. There’s something to say again, and this time it feels like it’s actually mine. Not a return to where I was. Something else. Something I don’t have a name for yet.
So I’ll ask you this:
Where in your life might you need to step away for a while?
Because if you’re constantly forcing the next thing, there’s a real chance you’re missing the thing that actually matters. Not because it’s hidden. Because you’re moving too fast to see it.
And sometimes the most honest thing you can do for your voice is to stop using it for a while.