Breathing Between the Lines: Voice, Survival, and Speaking Out

 

There’s a moment in David Blaine’s TED Talk—“How I Held My Breath Underwater for 17 Minutes”—where he talks about the feeling of pushing against the limits of human capacity. He trains his body to resist what feels like drowning. He talks about resisting panic, about being still, about staying silent when every instinct is screaming for air. That moment stayed with me—not just because of the physical intensity, but because it reminded me of what it feels like to stay quiet in spaces where your voice feels out of place. Sometimes, being silent isn’t a performance. It’s a survival skill.

This unit’s texts have helped me see that literacy and voice aren’t just about writing essays or reading books—they’re about breathing. They’re about who gets to speak, who gets to breathe freely, and who has to train themselves to hold their voice in for the sake of safety or acceptance. I’ve been there. Switching between the way I talk at home and the way I talk in school, learning to write in Standard English while thinking in a mix of slang, rhythm, and emotion that never quite fits the academic mold.

Reading June Jordan’s essay “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” cracked something open for me. Her refusal to separate her students’ lives from their learning, her insistence that Black English was not only valid but vital, made me realize that my voice has power. In Jordan’s class, language wasn’t just about rules—it was about identity, truth, and justice. She writes, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” That line stuck with me because it made me think about the world I carry every time I write or speak. I don’t always feel like my language fits the world of school, but maybe that’s because the world of school wasn’t built with my language in mind.

Before this unit, I thought being a good writer meant learning how to imitate a certain kind of voice—formal, polished, Standard English. But Genre in the Wild pushed me to rethink that. It showed me that genres aren’t fixed containers. They live in real-world “ecologies”—they adapt to audiences, purposes, and contexts. So instead of asking, “Is this the right way to say it?” I’ve started asking, “What does this moment need from me as a writer?” Sometimes it needs precision. Other times it needs a heart. And sometimes, it needs me to speak up—even if it breaks the rules

When Jordan describes how her students respond to the murder of their classmate, Willie Jordan, by writing in Black English as a form of resistance and grief, I think about how voice becomes protest. That’s where power lives—not just in what you say, but in how you say it. Her students weren’t just mourning. They were fighting to be heard in a system that wanted them silent.

That connects back to Blaine for me. He held his breath longer than anyone expected. But eventually, he had to come up for air. What if we treated voice that way—as something we all need to surface with, even when the world tells us to stay underwater? What if we stopped asking people to hold their breath just to be allowed in the room?

This unit reminded me that writing is not about choosing one side of a debate, but about “wavering,” like Stacey Waite says. Writing is exploration. It’s breath. It’s voice. And sometimes it’s struggle. When I write in a way that feels true to me—when I stop code-switching to sound more academic or more white or more neutral—I feel like I’m finally breathing.

So what does it mean to write with voice, with power? It means refusing to edit yourself out. It means understanding that genre is a tool, not a trap. It means seeing stories like Jordan’s students’, and understanding that language is often the only weapon we have to defend our lives.

I don’t want to keep writing like I’m holding my breath. I want to write like I’m speaking out loud. Like I believe someone is listening. Like I have the right to take up space.

That’s what I’m taking from this unit. That voice is survival. That literacy is not just about being understood, but about being heard. And that power lives not in mastering the rules—but in knowing when, and how, to break them.

Blaine, David. “How I Held My Breath Underwater for 17 Minutes.” TED, 2009.

Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1988, pp. 363–374.

Roozen, Kevin. Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)systems. Utah State University Press, 2016.