Youth

Your Voice Is Not a Metaphor

I heard voices. This is the part of my story that makes modern people most uncomfortable. They can accept the military genius, the political disruption, even the martyrdom. But the voices – the claim that I heard something others did not, that the hearing compelled me to action, that the action was justified by the hearing – this is where the discomfort lives.

I am not going to argue about whether the voices were divine, psychological, or something else. That argument is a distraction from the point, which is this: you hear voices too.

You Do Not Need Permission to Lead

Let me tell you what they said.

They said I was a child. They said I was a girl from a village no one had heard of. They said I had no training, no credentials, no army, no right to speak in the rooms where decisions were made. They said the voices I heard were delusion or worse.

They said all of this, and then they watched me lift a siege that their generals had failed to break for months.