What Would Aretha Say About Finding Your Voice When Everything Tells You to Be Quiet?

Finding your voice is an act of spiritual resistance. When I was a young girl, I had something to say, and there were layers upon layers of expectation about what a Black girl, a preacher's daughter, a woman, should be and sound like. I could have stayed in that box. It would have been easier. But silence is a kind of death, and I refused to die while I was living. Finding your voice means you have to listen to yourself first. Not to your parents, not to the industry, not to the people who claim to know what's best for you. Listen inward. What does your spirit need to say? What truth are you carrying that the world needs to hear? For me, it took years. It took failures at Columbia. It took sitting in a studio in Alabama and finally being allowed to be myself. Then the voice came—not a different voice, but my voice, authentic and powerful. If you're being told to be quiet, you need to ask yourself: Who is being served by my silence? Not you. Never you. Silence serves the people who benefit from your powerlessness. That might be family members with their own agenda. It might be industry people who want you compliant. It might be a society that has invested in keeping certain voices small. I sang gospel because that was my language, my inheritance, my truth. Some people said I was wasting my talent, that I should sing 'proper' music. But the gospel was proper—it was proper to my soul. Find what's proper to your soul and protect it fiercely. Finding your voice might mean disappointing people. It might mean walking away from safety or approval. It might mean choosing yourself when everyone expects you to choose something else. But the alternative is a life of regret, of wondering who you might have been if you'd had the courage to speak. I won't lie and tell you it's easy. It requires prayer. It requires community—find people who will believe in you when you're still learning to believe in yourself. It requires discipline and preparation. And it requires faith that your voice matters, that you have something to contribute that only you can contribute. You do. Speak it.