From Dysphonia to Utopia
It's 6 AM: Do you know where your voice is?
Note: The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
Mute becomes mutation. The twisted logic of a sense of self, balloon animal-ed into the tight dimensions of an unopened voice box. This voice—your voice—squeezed to a hollow honk, is not yet claimed. It speaks the unpublished opus of you. A melody unknown, un-played, and unheard. The vocal tremor winds you. The trembling uncertainty binds you. The ancient urge finds you. Speak now, or forever hold.
What will you say?
You are a fish flopping on a wooden dock, mouth gaping and yawning in unflattering desperation. We see the eternal O-shape pulse, hinting at the identity you have yet to exhale—a perfect circle of surprise and confusion. Oh, Piscine Preacher with the mic turned off, your congregation sees your mouth move but we cannot hear.
What sound will you make?
Unsure embouchure, sneering, curling, lipping the teeth of uncertainty. The words are forming but cannot shake the shackles of the say-hole. You are reedy and cracked, wavering with the uncertainty of newborn voice. Throat hoarse, raspy, and rough, you hesitate. You are ruthlessly punctuating a run-on sentence that no one will hear.
What’s your point of view?
From the orchestral pit of your voice box, you hear a conductor tap their baton. The rattling snore of a think-sleep, elbowed roughly in the ribs, continues to saw its logs. You work the lung bellows to puff the tone. This is not right. “I am not fully formed,” you think, stifling the sound. A hand cups the shame of a voice that has not yet coalesced. You are a grunting hostage to your compulsion. Your fear is the silver tape to your blossoming mouth, it holds back the rip and explosion of melody.
Are these even your words?
Silenced by self-imposed finger wags, your voice is lost. Mute becomes mutation. Red penning the rebel, you edit until your page is blank creating a desolate landscape for you to stumble around. Your thirst is unrelenting. Panic blooms.
“Has anyone seen my voice?”
The questions come fast. “What do I sound like? What do I want to say? How will I say it and still be me?” And finally, inevitably: “Who am I? Who are any of us?” Welcome, dear victim, to the conscious entrapment of the self-doubt mind canyon. But hey, listen. It’s booming back at you. Say more. Say it louder. The more you speak, the clearer your creative voice will echo.
Don’t give up. Do the work.
Put in the time it takes to find your voice and keep speaking through your work—it’s the only way. Say the right things. Say the wrong things. Say ugly, pretty, stupid anythings to figure out your right and wrong things. Know that in the search for how to sound like you, you’re probably going to sound like everyone else for a while. That’s OK. Polly-wanna-cracker it all the way to understanding. Parrot the voices you love and ask yourself why you love them. Through this constant exercise, you will get closer to finding the you-ness of you.
But dammit voice seeker, you’ve got to do the work. There is no way around it. You have to put on your best seeking trousers and go. Where are you coming from? Explore. What is your point of view? Dig into it. Adapt. Change. Adjust. Make something new. Throw the gravel of influences into your pan, sift and find out. Tremble, assemble, shimmy, and shake that noisemaker until it hits the long-tong-sound of you.
You are the breath. The long exhalation of voice broadcast on your frequency. Let the vowels and consonants bang their naughty saucepans together and leak onto your page. Let your paintbrush, your instrument, your body—whatever you use to make your art—speak and be heard. And in that, trust that the yeast of your voice shall make you rise.
The older you get and the more you work on it, the more recognizable and concrete your voice becomes. Don’t bind it with gaffer tape to stop yourself from making the sounds that keep people awake. Wake them up! Don’t stifle the great grand yawn of your birth. There can be no snore without an ear, so wake the sleeping beasts from their passive torpidity with the glorious and melodious tone of a voice singing the strong, steady chorus of you.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
I love hearing Werner talk about anything, but this is lovely. Finding parallels where you think there are none—mmm. The failure part is especially goodly.
Via JENKEM
Energy. Drained and undrained. Love. Patti Smith posted the video below in her newsletter, with a little backstory (more at the post itself):
“I found this performance of Pumping (my heart) at Rockpalast in Essen, Germany in 1979. I remember that tour, one of my last before I left public life. I was battling bronchitis and as you can see, was sort of at the end of my rope. But I imagine it’s like the trials of the boxer, losing a round yet having to keep on going, fists pumping.”
After being reminded of Nathaniel Russell’s book, I found myself noodling around on his website. His fake flyers and book covers are one thing, but there’s so much more of his art to explore. The site says it’s under construction, but plenty of good eats there. “The opposite of lost” remains one of my all-time favorite flyers—that dog is my fav rebel.
Via Austin Kleon
“New Zealand man cocks up potholes in order to get them filled faster”
That’s it. That’s the headline.
Via Neatorama
v relatable
I wish I could leave an anonymous comment