Growing up biracial, multi-lingual, an immigrant, autistic, a trauma survivor, my default safety mechanism was silence.

If I did use my voice, it was in a careful attempt to make others happy. I almost never sought attention, validation, or... well, anything. My comfort was in the shadows and solitude.

As a teacher and researcher, my life's work and service has brought me into constant reflection on the permission & purpose of using my voice.

While I outwardly honed my teaching and leadership voice, I simultaneously grappled with my inner narrative, my relationship with myself, and my experience with sharing myself with audiences.

My internal struggles intersected with my identity, socially-constructed labels, systemic inequities, trauma, and a fierce protection over what my heart & intuition has always led me to believe was sacred.

I was determined to seek, and even wait for, a better way.

While others around me published and promoted themselves without holding back, I stayed quiet, wondering if my voice would ever be necessary.

In this time of waiting, there were 2 things that would continually challenge my silence. Those 2 things would end up being 2 sides to the same coin:

1) My heart kept telling me to serve others through teaching. To share what I was learning with those who I was authentically connected to. To make the world around me better for everyone & everything.

2) People kept asking me to speak. To tell stories. To teach them. To give talks about how I was teaching people. To speak poetry. To lead workshops. To share with others what I was learning & how I was transforming.

In that 2-sided combination of my service & their ask lay an important lesson. I discovered that my message was bigger than my comfort, my ego, and even that single moment. Bigger than me. It was the life lessons given to me by the universe perfectly matched to the questions my audience was asking.

Those sacred lessons required a sensitive voice and ethical channel.

It also required learning.

Learning how to do my story work, to get clear on my life's work & service to this world, to know clearly what messages are meant to be channeled through me.

So I did my work.