For longer than I’d like to admit, I was writing in a voice that wasn’t mine — one Brené Brown line finally named what I was doing

For longer than I’d like to admit, I wrote like a worse version of Mark Manson.

I’d read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck — like a lot of people in their twenties around that time — and something about the voice had imprinted on me. The punchy declaratives. The casual swearing as load-bearing rhythm. The second-person directness that read as bracingly honest rather than preachy. When I started freelancing, that was the voice I reached for. Brief I’d never written for, subject I didn’t fully understand, deadline I was anxious about — I’d open the doc and try to sound like Manson.

It didn’t fit. The voice I was wearing had been built for a bestselling self-help book, not for a blog article on a site with many other writers. It didn’t fit me either; I don’t speak like that. I don’t think like that. 

Manson is the obvious version for me — he’s a blogger, a popular voice, the writer a lot of people my age absorbed. For some of you reading this, the borrowed register will be more academic: an essayist in a serious magazine, an academic whose argumentation patterns you took on in grad school, a literary novelist whose sentence rhythms you internalized. The specific writer doesn’t matter much. The mechanic is the same. You read someone whose work moved you, your ear picked up the cadence, and somewhere between admiration and writing your own pieces, the cadence stopped being something you noticed and started being the thing you were doing.

What finally named it for me was a line from Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection: “Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we are supposed to be and embracing who we are.” She wasn’t writing about writers. She was writing about identity and the work of not performing for everyone else’s approval. But for writers, the “supposed to be” has a particular shape. It’s the accumulated picture of what a serious writer sounds like — built up from years of reading, sharpened by every piece you’ve admired. You sit down at a draft and write toward the picture instead of from yourself.

The flatness shows up before you can name it. Drafts that come from this place tend to work at the sentence level — each line is defensible, the grammar holds, the structure makes sense — but the whole thing doesn’t compel. Editors might describe it as the piece feeling like it could have been written by anyone. Which is, in a sense, true: when you’re writing toward a template, you are writing as anyone. As the generalized competent writer rather than as the specific mind that has something to say about this subject.

The part of Brown’s line that did the work for me is daily practice. Not discovery. There’s no final moment at which you locate your voice and operate from it forever after. You let go again in every draft: of the shape you thought the piece should take, of the tone you assumed was required, of the ending you were building toward because it was the kind of ending a smarter essay would have arrived at. Each new piece arrives with a fresh set of supposed-to-be pressures — the publication’s house style, the genre’s conventions, the imagined editor, the imagined reader. The practice is noticing those pressures and asking, each time, whether you’re shaping the piece around them or around what you actually think.

In a draft, that looks like pausing to ask whether a sentence reflects what you actually believe or what you assumed the piece required. It looks like noticing when a paragraph sounds like a writer you admire and being honest about whether you’re reaching for their voice because it serves what you’re trying to say, or because it feels safer than your own. It’s the recurring choice to trust the instinct over the template — to leave in the detail that seemed too specific, the sentence that seemed too short, the observation that seemed too obvious to state because actually it needed to be stated and nobody else was going to state it that way.

None of this is comfortable. The borrowed voice is more defensible, especially early on. If it fails, you can point to the writer it was built on. Your own voice is harder to defend, because there’s no authority to appeal to except your own judgement. Learning to trust that judgement is the work Brown is describing, and it doesn’t get easier in the way most skills do. It just becomes familiar.

What I like about her line is that it refuses the flattering version of the story. It doesn’t say your real voice is inside you, fully formed, waiting to be uncovered. It says the finding is daily, which means the losing is also daily. The writers whose voices feel most distinctively their own are usually the ones who have been doing this long enough to be comfortable with the ongoing work of setting aside who they thought they were supposed to be.