Writing and Living and The Megaphone Voice

I got the idea for the megaphone voice from A Prayer for Owen Meany. I read it years ago, and the way John Irving capitalized whatever the boy with the broken voice said stuck with me. I dreamed in capital letters while I was first reading the book.  

When working with people who feel small, unseen, unheard, I started to wonder what would happen if everything they wrote (or said!) was in capital letters. Would they feel bigger, more important, more seen, more heard?

Back when I was in graduate school, someone in my class waited until the night before to write her thesis (only in creative writing can you begin to pull off such a stunt, I think), and when she handed it in, the whole thing was in capital letters, because, she said, her computer was stuck on caps lock and she hadn’t noticed. 

Her thesis was accepted, and ever since then I’ve had this feeling that maybe capital letters get a free pass that we don’t know about. We think they are for the beginning of sentences and for the first letter of proper nouns and for the few words we want to emphasize, but what if we want to emphasize the whole story, even if by accident? What if everything’s important? 

In a writing class, I asked people to write in their megaphone voice. What surprised me was how much energy erupted in the class as people read their pieces. You can FEEL the megaphone voice. It FEELS audacious and bold and often joyfully funny in its courage even when it is saying furious or sad things. At least that was my experience as I listened to the people read their megaphone voice work out loud and saw the other people in the group react. 

IT WAS SO POWERFUL AND FUN. 

Internal Family Systems is a form of therapy that believes we are made of parts, parts that yearn to be acknowledged, heard, and integrated into our system as a whole. I think the megaphone voice is one way to deal with a part who might usually talk in a whisper, or not at all. Imagine if you gave a shy second-grader a megaphone and the guts to speak their mind in the middle of the playground. That kid’s life could change forever. YOU GUYS ARE IGNORING ME AND I HAVE LOTS OF GOOD IDEAS. THIS LIFE IS NOT FUN FOR ME!!!

I know putting what is inside and hidden into the outside world where it gets seen and heard can genuinely feel life-threatening. Like, if people know what I thought about them and about everything else, they would hate me forever and I would die of shame and starvation and loneliness.

I have this image in my head of a little kid running excitedly to an important person in their life and sharing their enthusiasm to, it turns out, a stone wall or a dragon. I imagine the little kid’s brain armoring against future rejection, essentially saying No to life. No you can’t hurt me. No you can’t see me. No I won’t be doing that again. In this way, we become robots, only showing what we think will receive attention and praise, and if we have faced enough walls or dragons, this could dwindle down to the smallest of trickles where all we show is what we think others want to see: versions of themselves. 

These are the lives of quiet desperation. Thoreau wrote “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Confirmed desperation shows up eventually as rigidity in the body and mind. It’s people with painful low backs or I.B.S. or chronic migraines having the same thing for breakfast as they did the day before because that’s life. 

Part of the joy of life is failure. When a baby learns to stand, it has to fall. Without the falling, there is no standing. When you first learn to drive a stick shift, you have to be willing to grind the gears. When you learn to tango, you have to be willing to step on some toes. 

To exist is to be embarrassed, vulnerable, goofy. So is to write with abandon and deep curiosity. When you show yourself to people who don’t get you, who don’t help you feel seen, appreciated, loved or understood, the tendency can be to turtle and hide. But what if you just keep at it until you find the people who do get it? What if that’s your life’s work? To be you? What if it’s a mistake to think the people around us are supposed to get you? What if it’s a mistake to believe that if they don’t get you there’s something wrong with you or with them? What if they’re just not your mirroring people? What if part of the hero’s journey is to find mirrors that reflect your truth back to you? 

One trick, perhaps, with the megaphone voice is to practice in the privacy of your own home first and start to weed out things that are hateful and best said alone in the shower and things that would bring you community and understanding. That way your megaphone voice isn’t a two-year-old kid with a gun. It’s wild, but it’s also got a brain and humane boundaries.

However, this is where you need other people, since trusting yourself got you to a place where you were more likely to put tape over your mouth than use a megaphone to tell people what you thought. Probably at least half the things you think you shouldn’t say are things you SHOULD say in order to truly show up in the world as your true and radiant self.

You are confused. When you were a little kid and you went on and on about how great spaghetti is and your mother called you a chatterbox and her face was not happy, your brain learned that too many words makes Mom mad, and so you got quieter. Potentially forever.

That, clearly, is fucked up, but things like that happen all the time, and our poor, beleaguered brains that are only trying to keep us safe, also keep us from being our unpredictable and true selves by limiting the number of words we share with the world. 

I have tundras of tears in my body. I experience them when I am quiet, still: areas of frozen sadness. It’s almost as if nothing is there, except they occupy space inside of the space my brain identifies as “me”. The tears froze when they felt they could not trust the world. Maybe they do not even trust me, and so they try to hide from us both: the world and me. 

 I think this is part of deep storytelling, waiting out what is frozen, paying attention to the quiet until the deeper stories begin to emerge, until these feelings turn from almost nothing to ice to tears to words to WORDS.

WORDS become ACTIONS. ACTIONS become LIFE.

I received a text a little earlier today: “Is it natural to want to use the megaphone voice on literally EVERYTHING once it is opened up? Watch out world!”

YES. I think IT IS PERFECTLY NATURAL TO WANT TO SPEAK YOUR TRUTH ABOUT LITERALLY EVERYTHING.