Finding a voice

I want to give a voice to people whose problems our culture would rather ignore: the mentally ill, especially children, and women, especially those victimized by male aggression. Some days, that's what the Black Cat talks about.

Yet there are many days that I don't know what the Black Cat is supposed to say or how to say it. I have a voice, and apparently it's a decent one, at least on its best days. Yet how do I know when those days will strike? And how do I keep that voice true to itself and all the things I want need to say?

Hard questions.

As my blog description says, I want to write the beautiful, funny, sad, and strange. Yet if I face facts, I tend to be on a soapbox when people read me most. Is that then my true voice? The one on the soapbox? Soapboxes are all well and good, and Lord knows I love to prance around on mine. But is that all there is?

What about the rest? Can the voice declaiming from the soapbox also translate the extraordinary world that surrounds her on every side? Can she convey the beauty in the strange and the strangeness of the beautiful? Can she claim in writing the sometimes biting, sometimes silly humor that gets her through the day?

Or is the soapbox on behalf of the silent and the silenced her truest home?

More hard questions, questions to which I have no answer. If you do, please tell me. And if you don't, well, please just keep on reading. Maybe we can find my voice together.