I amplify small voices to tell big stories so they can be heard and lives can be improved.
The voices of my memories are small ones. They are women and girls I grew to know in India, they are my grandmother, and they are almost entirely female.
When I was a new college graduate projecting my career, I would have told you that I would go on to write stories about important and impactful voices. I would have told you that these voices were big and their bigness garnered attention and respect. Because they were big my writing would too be respected.
But I never thought about what would happen when I didn’t respect my own writing. I now can tell you that what would happen was I would quit writing. I grew tired of listening to the voices I was told were important and in an act of solidarity I refused to entertain them. If voices small like mine weren’t important, I would not acknowledge the importance of the big ones.
I went on a hiatus from the career world and moved to India to work with women and girls. I was surrounded by beautiful stories but I never thought to pick up a pen. Yes, these stories moved me, but ingrained in me was the thought that only big voices were worth sharing.
What moved me could not possibly be the thing needed for other people to bring into perspective the living we are doing, right?
Wrong. It’s exactly what we need. When I write I am haunted by joyful ghosts that are small voices. I could not possibly recall the words of that keynote speaker from the convention I attended in 2020 but could parrot to you the words shared in a classroom in India that was filled with women young and old.
I wish I would have written these stories when I was living among them, but now I sit at my desk, and reliving them is the motivation I need to make changes.
Today, I project a career for myself that is the foundation for small voices all over the world to stand upon and be big. I will write their stories and be the catalyst that moves them into a larger space.
Yes, there is a time and space for big voices, but when you are down on your knees the small voices are the ones that lift you up.
What if together, we could lift ourselves up by lifting up the small voices of the completely ordinary people around us.
A time when I pulled up my surprisingly shallow roots and quit.
It wasn’t like the movies where one day the main character walks into her boss's office with a certain clarity and drops the I’m moving on to bigger and better things bomb. It was more of a slow progression. I had been in the process of quitting before I had even started the job.
Recently, I met my grandmother in a dream. We were standing by a bright window in the corner of her living room.