Whose Voice Is That Really?

The hidden messages shaping your life more than you realize.

My son turned eighteen this year leaving for college in a few weeks. I become an empty nester primarily me focused for the first time in twenty-five years — pregnancy, marriage, motherhood, stacked on top of each other since before he existed. That space in me, built around someone else, opens up belonging to me again.

I felt nervous and excited at first. Now I mostly feel excited.  I focused on filling my calendar with the months after he leaves — travel, new things I never tried, more painting, the kind where I disappear into it instead of squeezing it in between my responsiblities.

This voice keeps interrupting that excitement, and it isn’t mine. Fear dresses itself up as me and drags up old worries. Right behind it: the helicopter-parent voice, insisting a good mom shows up for everything — parents weekend, every school break, every chance to prove it.

I showed up as that person once. He doesn’t need that anymore. Neither do I.

So I’m skipping parents weekend. I don’t know if he even wants me there. That choice might mean I don’t see him again until Thanksgiving — three and a half months out. That sits uncomfortable in me. Uncomfortable doesn’t mean afraid.

He wants to spend more of his time without me, and I understand that completely — I raised him alone, filled both parent roles, and he’s spent eighteen years finding himself under a lot of my attention. The more freedom I hand him, the more he chooses time with me instead of enduring it. We feed each other’s freedom.

Sixty arrives this year too. Underneath everything sits one real question: who am I without a child at the center of my calendar? I know my essence — I’ve done the work to find her (stripping away your roles, your who at the very core). Now she gets to meet a whole new stretch of choices.

Here’s where the voices sneak in hardest. I open my mouth to say what I think, and “sorry, but—” tries to slide in first. That apology doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to people who shaped me, people I love and respect — but somewhere along the way, their way of doing things took the wheel more than I meant to let it. My opinion runs my life now. Not most of the time. All of it.

Your own voice carries more weight than anyone else’s ever will, because you trust it the most and believe it the most completely. The work isn’t inventing a new voice. It’s clearing enough noise to hear the one you already carry. Sometimes it echoes what someone else told you — that’s fine. You still need to find it yourself, because it’s the one voice impossible to talk yourself out of trusting.

My dad hands out advice constantly, mostly unsolicited, because he loves us. For years it drowned out my own voice before I even heard it, and it made me angry. Before I worked and healed me. These days I mostly just listen — I know where it comes from, I treat it as one more option on the table, then I check in with myself and decide. Sometimes I take his advice. Sometimes I leave it. When I speak from a grounded, confident place, my parents’ fear settles and they come around almost every time.

Voices you never question don’t stay quiet in your head. They turn into beliefs, and unprocessed beliefs move into the body. Sleep that won’t come. Pain that never fully explains itself. A pattern you keep repeating and can’t understand why. Trace it back far enough, and you’ll often find a voice you mistook for your own.

I still catch the “non me” voice mid-sentence, even after twelve-plus years doing this work with people and many more years doing my own work. The difference? I catch it faster now. When an old voice grabs the wheel, I say it out loud: “Stop that.” My son learned young that I wasn’t talking to him. Now he just rolls with it.

That’s the practice — notice the voice, name it, choose again. It doesn’t matter to me if it ever fully disappears. If you’re catching yourself here, wondering which voice in your head actually belongs to you, start there. Just notice one today.

The next question is usually: now what? How do I actually hear my own voice over everyone else’s? That’s worth its own conversation.

With love and a little sass,
Marni