Whispering Wyrd

This is the most open I’ve ever been in my public writing, so please forgive me if it runs long.

I write because it’s the clearest way I know to speak from my inner world. Sometimes the only way I can express what I feel is through poetry. Other times, like now, I need plain words. And sometimes the two blend together. I’ve always written better than I speak. Spoken language has always felt… filtered. Shaped. Edited against judgment. Written language lets me speak as who I really am.

The Weight of Speech and Accent

Part of this comes from where I grew up. In my youth and young adult years, if I had spoken the way I thought, I would have been called “weird.” So I learned to talk like everyone else. I suspect many of my friends were doing the same. When I read the things they write now, I see depth and sensitivity that none of us ever spoke aloud. Peer pressure has a way of squashing what is alive in us.

To this day, I worry I sound like an uneducated backwoods hick when I speak. A few years ago, I was talking to an elderly woman in a park. She watched me for a long moment and finally asked, “Are you from Tennessee?”. It was the accent. I’m not from Tennessee, but I did grow up in rural Texas, and the accent stays whether I want it to or not. My sons don’t have the accent, one of them even trained his speech into a “neutral” accent. I’ve tried, but some things just live deep in the bones.

People hear the accent and assume ignorance before they hear the actual words or message. So again, I write.

Spirituality and Identity

Writing feels like my clearest expression of my spirit, my real self. When I wasn’t living that real self, I was deeply unhappy and clinically depressed. I spent so much of my early life trying to fit in, to not stand out too much. But one place where the pressure was especially strong was spirituality.

I believed things that weren’t welcome where I lived. I felt animist presence in the natural world. I resonated with Buddhism and Daoism. I sensed life, spirit, and meaning in all things. But those were not beliefs you spoke about in rural Texas. Not at all. So I tried very hard, many times, to believe like everyone else did. But it wasn’t me. Every time, I was living a lie and I hated it.

You didn’t talk about such things. You hid them. You guarded them. There were some things you just didn’t talk about or express in that time and place.

Once, I was even turned down for a job at a local tech company because they had read something I wrote about my spirituality. They told me in the interview that they “couldn’t trust someone who isn’t Christian.” I was stunned. It was blatant discrimination and they weren’t even trying to hide it. Shortly after that, I was hired by a major national company in a larger city about 50 miles away. There, they didn’t care what I believed, only about whether I could do the work. I became Junior Administrator of in-house software and access control there. Until the company was bought out and 900 of us were let go, it was the first time I felt valued for what I could do rather than judged for what I believed.

Living With a Restless Mind

I also live with ADD without hyperactivity. My mind never stops moving, and it moves fast. It can be overwhelming, but it has also driven me to read widely and deeply throughout my life. Research is one of my greatest comforts, especially during the lingering waves of benzo withdrawal I still sometimes have. For me, learning is a kind of meditation.

What I Want to Say to Anyone Struggling to Be Themselves

Do what heals you!

Your true friends and family, if their love is real, will not abandon you for being who you really are.

Society, on the other hand, is fickle. It will break you if you let it. So don’t let it!

I am happier now than I have ever been, not because everything is easy, but because I finally live in a place where I am free to be myself. Who I really am. I spent most of my life in the deepest depression imaginable. Moving here saved me, it gave me hope. And hope is powerful medicine, a powerful antidote to clinical depression.

If you have to suppress your spirit to belong or “fit in”, then you are not where you belong.

You are unique. The world has more than enough copies, masks, and echoes of “real”.

The world needs you. The real you.

Be free.

Be bold.

Be yourself.

~Buck