I was reviewing the long, tedious process of editing my book, Kingdom Journeys. I'm finally satisfied with it. But a couple of times during the four year writing and editing process, I lost my voice. The manuscript no longer sounded like me.

I had to fight to recover it.

A lot of us are like that with our lives. We get around someone who has a lot of authority and we let them tell us how to write the story of our lives. In a way, we give them permission to edit our lives.

And some people can lose their voice, just as I lost mine. They begin to walk and talk like someone other than themselves. This is especially sad to watch in young people, who may have never found their voice in the first place.

For example, it happens when, having never had the chance to find his voice, a young man joins a gang. The gang leaders tell him how to think and act. The young man gets tattoos - tattoos that were someone else's idea of what he should look like. And the tattoos symbolize the way others have written all over him. He no longer looks like himself.

It can happen more subtly to all of us. When we allow those with a strong personality to substitute their voice for ours, we lose ourselves.

Losing and finding your voice is the stuff of fairy tales. Think about Cinderella, a princess dressed up as a servant girl, or the Little Mermaid, who literally has her voice stolen.

People the world over are trying to steal our voice and write our story for us. But only we can write the story of our lives. We need to fight to find our voice and use it to tell our own story.

Some of us are stuck in relationships that feel suffocating. We can whither inside if we live like that. It's no way to live.

You may not have heard the sound of your own voice for too long. But the world needs to hear it. Don't let someone use you as a ventriloquist's dummy. There will never be another you. You're at your best when the voice we hear is authentically your own.