Echoes

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

 — Oscar Wilde

 An echo is a sound that reflects off distant surfaces—coming back to us in pieces, distorted and delayed. It is not the source, but the residue. Not the voice we sent out into the world, simply its ghost.

What does it mean then when we are only listening to the “echoes” of our lives?  When we listen more to the voice coming back to us, than to the words we put out into the world.  Why do we trust the voice that returns more than our own inner knowing?  Especially when the voice that comes back to us is a reflection, not of who we are, but of who others want us to become. 

In the myth of Echo and Narcissus, Echo is cursed to repeat only the last words spoken to her—she has no voice of her own. She falls in love with Narcissus but cannot tell him how she feels. She can only reflect his words back to him. Trapped in response, not expression, she fades into nothing but a voice—an echo.

Narcissus, meanwhile, falls in love with his own reflection in the water. He becomes transfixed by the image of himself, unable to look away, unable to connect to anything deeper or real. He doesn’t fall in love with who he is, but with the idea of who he is—a filtered, idealized version that has no substance.

This myth mirrors what happens when we live through reflection rather than expression.  When we trust the echo.

We speak, act, and even love—not from what we truly feel, but from what we hope will be given back to us. Approval. Recognition. Validation. Like Echo, we become disconnected from our original voice, and like Narcissus, we mistake what we hear for reality.

We chase the echo of belonging rather than speaking our truth.

As Oscar Wilde states above, most of us are an echo of what is returned to us, not an honest representation of who we are or what we think. To “fit in”, we become not what we put into the world, but what is returned to us through expectations, judgment, and other people’s perceptions of the world as they see it.  Thoughts that are shaped by the surfaces they hit—other people’s stories, societal narratives and expectations, old wounds. What bounces back to us is not truth. It is truth bent through a lens.

We move through our days responding NOT to our original voice—the clear, authentic signal within—but to the reverberations of how it’s been received, rejected, reshaped, or ignored by others. Before our words even leave our mouths, we are already listening for the distorted return.  We quiet our words, maybe even pretending they were never uttered. We question their worth. And, based on what we receive back, we continually edit ourselves into something safer, smaller, and more acceptable.

Over time, our original voice—the one rooted in knowing, purpose, and presence—gets buried beneath the noise of inner doubt. We forget what we meant to say. What we truly feel. What we need.

Instead, we become the echo.

We chase approval. Achievement. Belonging. Productivity. We listen for the echo to tell us who we are, rather than listening to the voice that spoke first—before it met resistance and began its path back to us.

To come home to ourselves, we must stop chasing echoes. We must listen for our original voice—not what others have heard, or wanted to hear, but what we truly meant to say. That voice, our voice, still lives in the quiet stillness of our soul, beneath the noise.

We must also remember that nothing is absolute.  No one should live solely in Echo or Narcissus.  There needs to be a balance.  Sometimes we need to reflect to others.  “I hear you and I understand.  You are not alone.”  And we need to allow others to see what we cannot see in ourselves.  Accept a compliment, a reflection from the outside. Allowing others to acknowledge those parts of ourselves that remain hidden no matter how often we look in the mirror. 

Our true voice, our true nature, has not vanished. It is simply waiting to be remembered.  Acknowledged.  It is waiting patiently, silent in our core, for us to let its truth be known.  For us to trust ourselves again.

The healing begins when we reclaim the voice before the echo. When we stop asking, “How will this be received?” and start asking, “What is true for me?” It begins when we stop performing and start expressing.  When we stop shaping ourselves to fit the reflection and instead speak from our heart.  The part of us that truly knows what we need and want.  Our truth. 

Echoes do not define us, unless we let them. It takes courage to send our words out into the world and learn to selectively choose what we hear back.  An echo doesn’t ask permission to return; it simply reflects what’s been sent.  Take back what serves you and let go of the rest.  Trust your inner voice.