My Voice Is Not a Mistake

I was raised on a phrase nobody ever said out loud, but that lived in every silence expected of me: niñas se ven y no se oyen. Girls are seen, not heard. No one had to repeat it — it was in the way voices dropped when I spoke too loud, in how I got called “contestona” for simply telling the truth, in the look my mama gave me across a room when I said what everyone else was thinking but wouldn’t say.

For years I carried that programming like it was personality. I thought I was “shy.” I thought I was “polite.” I thought I was “respectful.” I wasn’t any of that. I was a girl trained, patiently and lovingly and generationally, to distrust her own voice.

And here’s the part nobody tells you: that training doesn’t stay in childhood. It follows you into boardrooms, into relationships, into the moment you’re about to ask for what you’re worth and something inside you clamps down instead. You call it professionalism. You call it not wanting to make waves. Really, it’s a nine-year-old inside you who once learned that speaking up cost too much.

The solar plexus doesn’t lie

In energy work, the solar plexus is our center of personal authority — the place where our real yes and our real no are born, before the mind edits them into something more acceptable. When that center closes in childhood, it doesn’t disappear. It goes dormant. It waits for permission.

The good news, mujer hermosa, is that the permission was never coming from outside. It never came from your madre, your teacher, that jefe who talked over you in every meeting. It was always waiting for you to give it to yourself.

Two daily practices

This week I want you to try two things, every single day.

Primero: question it. Every time an inner voice says “cállate,” “don’t be dramatic,” “it’s not that big of a deal” — stop and ask it directly: whose voice is this? Say it out loud if you can. Nine times out of ten, it isn’t yours. It’s a parent’s fear. A teacher’s discomfort. A culture’s rule about what a “good girl” does.

Segundo: answer it back — out loud, in whatever language it spoke to you in. If it spoke in Spanish, answer in Spanish. If it spoke in English, answer in English. This isn’t just poetic. The wound was bilingual, so the healing has to be too. Your nervous system remembers the exact language the silence was taught in, and that’s the language it needs to hear itself get overruled in.

The chain-reaction

Last week we talked about the solar plexus and reclaiming authority. This week, that authority finds its most direct, most physical form: your voice. There is no reclaiming of personal power that doesn’t eventually run straight through saying the truth out loud, in front of someone who might not like hearing it.

You don’t need to become loud. You don’t need to become someone who overshares or dominates every room. You just need to stop treating your own voice like a mistake that needs apologizing for.

Try the practice this week. Notice what happens in your chest the first time you answer back. That tightness loosening — that’s not nothing. That’s the plexo solar remembering it belongs to you.

What this looked like for me

The first time I actually tried this, I was standing in my kitchen, and the voice that came up was in my madrecita’s tone, in Spanish, telling me I was being “malcriada” for wanting to renegotiate a contract that undervalued me. I said, out loud, in Spanish, “No estoy siendo malcriada. Estoy siendo justa conmigo misma.” I’m not being disrespectful. I’m being fair to myself. I felt ridiculous. I also felt something unclench in my chest that had been clenched for probably thirty years.

That’s the part nobody warns you about: reclaiming your voice doesn’t feel powerful at first. It feels awkward, exposed, a little dramatic — exactly the words you were taught to fear. Do it anyway. The awkwardness is the old programming losing its grip, not a sign you’re doing it wrong.

This is generational work. It’s also daily, boring, repetitive work — a practice, not a one-time breakthrough. But every time you answer that inner voice back instead of obeying it, you’re rewriting what your solar plexus believes is true about you. And that rewrite is the whole point.

A note on “too much”

If you take one thing from this, let it be this: the word “too much” was never a description of you. It was a description of someone else’s capacity. A room that couldn’t hold your honesty said you were too honest. A relationship that couldn’t hold your needs said you were too needy. A family that needed you quiet called your voice too loud. None of that was measuring you accurately — it was measuring the size of the container you were in.

You get to build bigger containers now. Rooms, relationships, businesses, a life — that can actually hold the whole of you, voice included. That’s the work this practice is really pointing toward.

If this stirred something in you, subscribe ❤️ I go deep, every week:

And if you’re ready to go further, my book is waiting for you:

Gumroad (ebook en español): https://martiangel.gumroad.com/l/yltof

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Energy-Life-Personal-ebook/dp/B0078IMO8S?ref_=ast_author_mpb