I lost my voice.

Maybe it’s wrong to say I “lost” my voice. The truth is, I gave it away. I gave it away to ten years of institutional writing.

I used to love writing. It was how I shared myself with the world, and I built a career on it. I had a strong voice, and my passion flowed through the words.

Then I stopped loving it. It became a chore. I wrote tens of thousands of words to help a travel company survive the COVID pandemic and lockdowns. I wrote grant reports and grant proposals for nonprofits. I wrote more words than I ever had before. But over time, every word came more slowly, and I rarely felt energized at the end.

I thought I was just burned out. That I needed a break. 

So, I took one. I have not written professionally for the last year and a half. I waited for the urge to come back. I told myself that I was waiting for inspiration to strike, and that I needed to write things for me for a while. But in the last year and a half, I never grabbed a pen and a notebook or sat down in front of my computer. Inspiration did not chase me down and tackle me to get the flow going again.

It is only recently that I realized this can’t be a passive process. I can’t go about my life and wait to be inspired to write something for me. I need to actively remember how to write as me.

It turns out that I was not actually tired of writing. I was exhausted from sanding every edge, softening every hard word, trying not to offend anyone. Nothing about my writing excited me anymore, and I didn’t even notice it happening.

I am now starting physical therapy for my voice. For a writer who has lost his ability to write, it’s like regaining the use of your legs after an accident. It will be a slow and sometimes painful process, but it feels good to be starting the journey.

The role AI played in this

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. If you do too, your feed is probably also inundated with people complaining about how everything on there is written by AI now, it all sounds the same, it’s all slop, it feels flat and no humans are expressing themselves there anymore.

The more of those posts I read, the more I started thinking about my own writing over the last ten years. And honestly, I wasn’t sure if anybody would be able to tell if I had written those words or if AI had. It all sounded the same. It all felt flat and safe. I was saying things in the way I thought the world wanted to hear them and in ways that couldn’t possibly offend (or interest) anyone.

Ironically, it was a LinkedIn post by a Claude.ai apostle named Ruben Hassid that started me on this path to reclaim my writing. He offered a prompt to have Claude.ai create a 100-question interview to define your voice. His purpose for that prompt was to make it easier for AI to write as you and sound like you so you wouldn’t have to do your own writing anymore and could push out tons of content.

For me, it went in a completely different direction. I didn’t want AI to write for me. I wanted my voice back. Ruben’s post showed up at just the right time, and I decided to go with it.

I set up the prompt and, man, I’m still not sure if it was an interview or a therapy session. The beauty of AI used in the right way is that it doesn’t simply create 100 questions and walk you through them. The questions evolve as you go. It follows threads and calls you on your shit. 

It took me three days to complete the interview. There were times it brought me to tears, times I was simmering with anger, times I had to tell it to get back on track, and times it told me I was chickening out from answering a question in a real way.

Perhaps its most clarifying insight was this one:

Your sharpest, most fun, most successful writing happened when you had no institutional affiliation and no career to protect. Third-most-read blog in Uganda — that’s not nothing. You built an audience by being bold and funny and pointed, and then you spent the next decade learning to sand all of that off.

Ouch. Yeah. After uploading many pieces of writing from different stages of the last 15 years, it became clear that the pieces I had the most fun writing were the ones that Claude identified as the sharpest and most effective. The writing that helped me earn a living? Meh.

Another reflection from the interview:

Every time you remove a constraint, the writing gets more alive.

I don’t know where this journey is going to take me now. Maybe I will rebuild a writing career based on my own, unconstrained voice. Maybe I’ll just write for fun and build fences for a living.

What I do know is that I’m writing again now. I have more words than I have time to put down on paper, and I’m having FUN doing it! I’ve missed that. I’ve missed wanting to write.

Midway through writing something, I still catch myself slipping back into the sanded version of me. I’ll notice my mind drifting or notice myself getting bored with what I am writing. That’s my cue to stop, put it away, and come back after thinking about what I really want to say.

And then I re-read this part of the interview:

Claude: We’ve spent this entire interview excavating who you are as a writer. You’ve shown me the bold Uganda blogger, the cautious institutional voice, the playful hunter, the angry poet, the meditative nature seeker, the cantankerous travel critic, and the guy who’s afraid to take up space. They’re all you. If all of those voices walked into a room together, what would the best version of Mark Jordahl — the one you’re trying to become — say to them?

Me: Don’t be afraid.

Claude: That’s the whole interview, Mark. “Don’t be afraid” — from the guy whose best writing happens when the fear drops away. That’s your entire journey in three words.