How I Learned to Trust My Voice After I Lost It
When my physical voice failed, I had to learn that I deserve to be heard
The voice box is a pink, slick mass through which air blows. It’s an alien with a toothless smile. When its folds, the vocal cords, work properly, they press together as we speak, mirroring humming lips. Air slips through the cords. They quake and can vibrate up to 1,000 times per second. That rattled air becomes voice.
I lost my voice at 15. I sounded like a boy hitting puberty, as my inflections became an unpredictable mash of breaks and warbles. I increasingly scratched and pitched through syllables, while my voice, the one I could own and control to bring thought to word, faded into adolescent memory.
I had a sense that if I could not stave off the problem early, my voice would be permanently stained, made imperfect.
I’d been raised by a woman whose utterances were chopped by a gravel of vocal static. My mother’s voice, a sound that nature taught me at a young age to adore, often baffled outsiders. But I’d been raised with its rhythms; a deep, native part of me could always hear what she meant.
