Finding Your Voice After Years of Silence

Some conversations stay with you long after you close the recording tab. My talk with Erin Snow was one of those. I walked away feeling the weight of her story, but also the quiet power of finally saying something you had spent most of your life holding inside. Her journey reminded me that healing is not a single moment. It is a slow return. A small opening. A soft exhale you did not know you were waiting for.

In a world where we often praise loud confidence, Erin’s story shows what can happen when the voice you reclaim is one you stopped trusting years ago. Her experience gave me a new appreciation for the kind of courage that grows in the dark before it ever makes its way into the light.

The Silence We Carry

Many of us carry a silence we never meant to keep. Sometimes it starts with fear. Sometimes with shame we did not choose. And sometimes it begins in childhood, long before we understand what any of it means.

When Erin was nine, she woke up in the middle of the night at a friend’s house and knew instantly that something was very wrong. She told me she felt excruciating pain but also an instinctive pull to stay quiet. Her mind kept repeating the same message. Be still. Pretend you are asleep. Protect yourself. That moment became a fault line in her life. A before and an after.

She carried that memory without words for decades. She built a life around being strong and composed. On the outside, she looked capable. On the inside, she was still keeping a terrified child safe in the only way she knew. Silence can feel protective until it becomes a cage.

This part of her story stayed with me because it is not only about trauma. It is about how we learn to survive. How a child’s instinct becomes an adult’s identity. How keeping quiet can become a habit we forget we are practicing every day.

The Long Return to Yourself

What struck me most was how Erin described the moment she finally spoke the truth she had buried. It was not loud. It was not dramatic. It felt like a release. A sigh she had been holding since childhood.

Healing rarely looks like the movies. It is usually slow. Uneven. Full of days when you think you are moving backward. Erin’s healing came in seasons. A little clarity here. A boundary there. A new sense of safety in her own body. Every small step was a way of saying, I deserve to be heard.

Her years working as a legal advocate for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault deepened her awareness of this. She saw women who had been silenced by fear or circumstances and noticed the same patterns in herself. She helped them find their voices while slowly remembering that she had one too.

There was something beautiful and painful about that. Sometimes we teach others what we are still learning. Sometimes helping someone else speak becomes the first step in hearing ourselves.

When Listening Becomes Liberation

What Erin created next feels like the natural outcome of a life shaped by both silence and truth. She founded Seacoast Listening Lounge, a space where women can speak freely without interruption or judgment. It is not therapy. It is not coaching. It is listening in its purest form. A place where the words you finally say do not have to be perfect or tidy. They only have to be yours.

She told me she believes listening can be liberating. Not because it fixes anything, but because it gives shape to the things we have kept hidden. It gives them air. It gives us room to breathe again.

Hearing her describe her work, I kept thinking about how many people move through life without ever being truly heard. Not deeply. Not fully. Not with presence. Listening sounds simple, yet it is one of the hardest gifts to offer. Erin built an entire practice around that gift because she knows what it feels like to live without it.

Her story reminded me that we often underestimate the power of presence. A quiet room. A steady listener. A moment where you are not performing or managing or pretending. For many of us, that is where healing begins.

The Courage to Name What Hurt You

What Erin shows so clearly is that reclaiming your voice is not only about speaking. It is also about naming what hurt you. It is about letting the truth exist outside your body so it no longer controls how you move through the world.

There is courage in that. A slow, steady courage that grows the more you use it. Erin spent years unlearning silence. Years of learning how to trust her own voice again. Her story is a reminder that it is never too late to come home to yourself.