“Because now I’ve got a voice.”

It’s almost Christmas.  Time for those busy, yet strangely stale-feeling, weeks that exist in the blank space between an old and a new year, when you – or is it just I? – decide what and who are worth persevering with.

If you’re in my sphere of professional contacts (lucky you!), a great deal of the social media posts you’ll read from local businesses were written by me.  The good, interesting posts, that is.  Maybe this is part of the reason why I won’t go back on the socials: too much echo.  I enjoy not having to see the posts I’ve written.  I also enjoy the faint glimmer of annoyance I see in other people’s eyes when they realise they’ll have to explain something they wrote, because I didn’t see it.

It’s the simple pleasures in life, eh?

This week I was tasked to help write a wedding speech.

I’ve got some experience of this, having written a handful of best man and father-of-the-bride speeches in the past.  I also wrote my own wedding speech this year.

Writing a personal speech is hard.  Much harder than a fact-based professional speech, which most people won’t expect to enjoy anyway, so the bar is set reassuringly low.  Meanwhile, personal speeches have to be memorable and heartfelt, but they also have to be light and tinkling, in a way that invites everybody – stranger, acquaintance, and friend – in.

Oh, and it helps if you can be a bit funny, because all the best speeches are funny, aren’t they?  But then, the worst ones try to be funny and fail miserably.  It’s a fine line.

Quite frankly, as I struggled with my own wedding words I wondered if I should just… not do a speech at all.

I didn’t have to.  The bride isn’t really expected to say anything, just look radiant (and when the blushing bride is in her late forties, that’s challenge enough).  As I read through my speech, I kept feeling like I was missing something.  But what?  I’d thanked everyone I needed to thank.  I was saying nice things about everyone I needed to say nice things about.  I’d even thrown in a couple of jokes… in-jokes I was certain the right people would find funny.

I also couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was probably going to be upset or offended, even if only in passing (I come from a large and fragmented family, in which it is simply not possible not to upset or offend someone).

Why bother, I asked myself?

Then I remembered the first question from an unconventional, totally compelling public speaking course I took a few years ago.

It was: “Why are you speaking?”

Not, “who is your audience?” or “what are you going to talk about?”, which are the usual questions people ask themselves before they write a speech.  But when I asked myself why I was speaking, I realised something important.

I’ve been married before, and I didn’t make a speech at my first wedding, aged 27.  It wasn’t the done thing for the bride to speak, and besides, I’d have been too terrified.

That first wedding was also filled with things I didn’t want, but were expected.  My dad gave me away, even though I hated the idea of being silently passed from one man’s ownership to another’s.  My estranged mum was there, even though I hadn’t wanted her to be (you’ll regret it forever if your mum isn’t at your wedding, went the clueless refrain back then).  For a multitude of reasons, I gradually lost my identity during the ensuing seven-year marriage.  It took years of hard work for me to find it again.

That’s why I chose to speak at my wedding.  Because now I’ve got a voice.

This understanding made me read my words with new eyes.  I didn’t change much about what I’d written, but when I practised reading the speech aloud I sounded happier and more relaxed… like I relished every word.  At this wedding, my mum wasn’t there and nobody gave me away (I told my dad that really, my ex-husband should give me to my new husband, since he was the one who’d technically been given ownership of me back in 2005.  This did not go down well, but I liked it).

I had a voice, and I was finally using it.

The person who’d asked me to write a wedding speech was struggling with some of the same issues I had.  He wasn’t sure about some of his jokes, and he was worried he hadn’t got the tone quite right.  When I asked him why he was speaking, he looked surprised.  “Because I’ve been asked to,” he said.

So we dug a little deeper, and there we found magic.