Hearing Voices

Years ago, I loved a boy.  As with all stories that begin thusly, it is a very long tale.  The long and short of it was he didn't love me.  And I went through a few months of deep, bottomless despair during which I would often find myself lying prostrate on the floor of my room, wondering what the hell was happening to me.  He's gone now, thank the universe.

But lately I have found myself stuck on the same emotional Mobius Strip I was on back when he was around.  I lie awake in the moments before I fall asleep asking myself why my life is where it is, and if there is anything I could have done differently.  The focus of my angst is not some guy, but my job, and its implications for my activist identity, and the person I am trying to be in the world.  I tell my friends and my partner that one day out of the five days a week I am at work, I have a hoot laughing at some of the truly ridiculous things that happen when a group of people decide that they know how to best define activist conversation on a particular issue.  The other four days, I just want to cry.  I want to cry because I am actively participating in something that I feel will end up doing more harm than good.  I am spending my days, 9 to 5, aiding and abetting acts of 'social change' I don't believe in.  I am actively helping people who I believe are perpetuating the racist, sexist assumptions that got this country to where it is in the first place.

I want to cry because I am afraid of what this job is doing to my voice.  One of my colleagues wrote a moving essay about how she has had her voice taken from her during the time she has spent at this place.  I told her that I believed that even in our measured, carefully regulated silences (that are broken only on anonymous blogs and in private conversations) there is voice. Silence is resistance. I absolutely believed that when I said it to her a few days ago.  But there are days like today, where I'm not so sure anymore.  It took every ounce of strength I have to muster the courage to make a point (not a controversial or original one, mind you) in a staff seminar the other day.  The minute I opened my mouth, I started shaking, and I was sure I would not be able to finish a single sentence, let alone a thought.  But I did it.  And, man, was it liberating!  It hit me this morning that surely I should be able to speak without shaking, surely I should take for granted my freedom to interpret data and report it without fear that I am not towing a particular line?  If I do not exercise my voice, in spite of the restrictions placed on it, where will it go?  If you are in an environment where your voice is subsumed, and you can only ever use it on anonymous blogs, and in private conversations with your friends, or yourself, does it disappear?  Are you guilty of not using it? 

The only immediate answer available is to be silent in loud ways.  I have decided that, no matter what it looks like on my CV, no matter how scary it is going to be to literally halve my salary as I am on the cusp of starting a life with my partner, I am going to leave my job at the end of next month.  It's not the loudest of protest; in fact, it is tantamount to silence.  But I expect that it is silence that will be loud enough to restore my voice.