The Evolution of a Voice

I used to think growth meant getting louder. Writing more. Filling the page with the right words, the clever ones, the ones that proved I belonged. But lately, growth feels quieter. It feels like learning to listen again—to silence, to rhythm, to the way my voice has shifted in the spaces between what I once wrote and what I write now.

When I look back at my early poems and stories, I can trace the person I was by the urgency in the language. Every line trying to say something. To explain, to justify, to make sure I was understood. But somewhere along the way, I stopped chasing understanding. I started trusting the reader to meet me where I am.

That’s what growth looks like now: not reaching harder, but letting go. Not shouting, but opening space for the whisper.

I don’t write with outlines or detailed character maps. I write from feeling. A fragment, a sentence, a line that hums like an ache beneath the skin. I live in that moment first—inside the rhythm, inside the breath. I let the character or the voice find me. I let them breathe before I ask what story they’re here to tell.

Then I build the structure around the feeling, not the other way around. That’s true in both my poetry and my prose.

My poetry teaches my prose restraint: how to sit inside a moment, how to trust a pause, how to let one image carry the weight of a hundred explanations.
My prose teaches my poetry patience: how to build instead of burn, how to stay with a heartbeat long enough to see what it becomes.

Each time I move between them, I realize how much the other has changed me. My prose grows more lyrical; my poetry becomes braver. They orbit one another, shaping and refining the voice between them—a voice that is never finished, only evolving.

Maybe that’s what growth really is: not finding a single voice and holding onto it, but allowing it to change shape. To soften. To sharpen. To reflect the life you’ve lived since the last time you wrote.

I don’t think we’re meant to sound the same forever.
We’re meant to sound truer.

Every poem, every story, every new draft is a record of that truth—proof that we are still becoming.

So write again. Even if your voice trembles. Even if it sounds nothing like it used to.
That’s not loss.
That’s evolution.