Being "Voice"

A few years ago I was working on a show called Shevolution with Powerstories Theatre in Tampa. 

During this show, we were each to find a word that we declared in an “I AM” statement - words like courage, love, magic, trust. We wore these words on capes at the end of the performance. 

Mine was “I am Voice.” 

I have been “Voice” throughout my life. 

I’m the one that says out loud what everyone in the room is thinking. At age 11, I informed my parents we were boycotting Canada because of the seal slaughter. In college, I fought an attempt by my college dormitory to take away the music room on my performing arts floor, using their own words to win the case.

As a teacher, I called out racism, sexism and socio-economic inequalities in the public schools. It landed me in a Sunday edition of the Washington Post. Challenging the status quo earned me labels like “rebel” and “dangerous combination of brains and creativity”. 

In 2021 I wrote and performed my first autobiographical one woman show, voicing all I had learned during the first year of the pandemic and all the cultural programming that I was ditching as a result. 

If you know me, you know where I stand on pretty much everything. I don’t think anyone has ever said, “That Janice, she’s a mystery.” 

I’ve told lots of personal stories over the years. 

The one that landed me in the Washington Post was about the sexual harrassment I experienced in the high school where I worked. It led me to a new school and a new direction in my career. 

The one I told in my first Powerstories show was about me reclaiming my power by embracing my truth and my voice. 

My solo show, My Year of Saying No, is about all I released during COVID and how I began to build a new life in the empty space. 

As an actor, even as I step into and tell another person’s story, I always learn something new about myself.

And it’s not just my own voice that matters to me. I believe in using my voice to make space for others to do the same. I am a stand for amplifying the voices that white christian nationalist patriarchy seeks to silence. 

I am a stand for each person’s right to embrace their authenticity and live it out loud!

And yet, I still struggle at times to be “Voice.” 

I’m a middle-aged, childless woman and society would prefer I stay invisible. I am a Northeasterner living in the South. My straightforward speaking often offends people. I’m a Blue dot in a sea of Red. My neighbors are not interested in my take on race, sex, or climate change.

Every time I prepare to mount my solo show (which I’ve now done eight times), I fret that my show doesn’t really matter, that what I have to say is not important to society at large, that I haven’t struggled ENOUGH to share my story of what I’ve overcome. 

These little naysayer voices try to derail me from being capitol V “Voice.” They can be loud and they can be persuasive.

So when I feel myself retreating from what I long to do, I get still in my body. I tune into all the voices in my head, turning down the voices of the naysayers and turning up the volume on the voices that seek to support me. 

There’s my amazing solo theater coach who is always encouraging me to stretch and take the next leap, my mentor who reminds me to “Dream big,” my business coach who reminds me just how much my voice is needed in the world. 

And, most importantly, there’s my internal voices who believe in what I’m doing, the ones who remind me that I have hard won wisdom that can lift up others, that the joy I get from the work tells me I’m doing what I am meant to do, that each and every authentically told story makes the world a better place to be.

I have a heart that leaps when I feel the audience leaning in to listen, a soul that soars when someone shares with me how my story helped them, a body that radiates with energy at the end of every performance. 

All this wisdom reminds me why it’s worth it - to walk the path of authenticity, to take creative risks, to embrace the journey of being “Voice.”