Finding your voice — and keeping it

There’s one challenge most bloggers face: discovering their unique voice.

And honestly, the only real way to find it is to just keep blogging. With a bit of luck (and a lot of writing), we’ll get there eventually.

But keeping that voice alive? That can be just as tricky.

It’s easy to get distracted by the glow of upvote buttons and traffic stats. That’s one of the reasons I really like the no likes, no stats approach. (There are, of course, situations where analytics are useful or even necessary — but that’s not what I’m talking about here.)

If we stare too long at the numbers, we’ll start noticing which posts get more attention, and we might feel tempted to just follow that path.

We might even convince ourselves, “This is my true voice.”

But is it really? Or is it just the hungry ego chasing clicks, dressing up its desire as authenticity?

It’s easy to fool ourselves. But readers? Not so much. They’ll spot the fakery faster than you can learn how to format text in Markdown.

Once you find your voice, hold on to it. But holding on doesn’t mean restraining it. You grow, you learn, you change — and so will your voice.

As an example: I originally published a version of this text on my old blog. Even though that version was less than a year old, this rewrite turned out quite different.

Take care of your voice. Nourish it like the living, growing thing it is.

It’s rare. It’s precious. And it’s uniquely yours.

Let it stay that way.