Love It or Hate It

I have a complicated relationship with my voice, which I don’t think is uncommon among singers. In fact, I think a complicated relationship with your skills and talents is not uncommon regardless of what they might be.

Sometimes I love my voice. I can hear power and strength, softness, tenderness, clarity. I can hear all the work I’ve put into learning how to use it. I can hear the emotion I’m trying to convey. And I really, really love it.

Other times I hate my voice. I hear it as too nasal, as too wobbly, as unpleasant. I hear all the bad things I can imagine my worst detractors saying about it. I certainly hear all the problems I’ve been working on over the years, whether they are still there or not.

I flip back and forth between these stances as I listen to myself, either while I’m actually making the sound or in a recording. Sometimes it happens very quickly, even within the same note. Other times I’ll love my voice for a long time, and the suddenly hate it. Or vice versa.

When I was badly depressed in the late aughts, I stopped singing altogether. It was hard to do something that vulnerable. When I finally started trying to return to it, years later, I hated my voice for not being what it had been before I stopped singing. I was consistently disparaging of both my voice and myself for not being able to Do It Better. I eventually realized that at the “height” of my singing prowess (in university) I had very likely been hypomanic, and honestly not all that accurate in my assessment of my skills. Oh, I wasn’t bad, but I was certainly not as good as I felt like I was. That was a different kind of blow; I wasn’t trying to get back what I had lost, I was trying to get better, but without being able to trust my own assessment of my skills.

I’m in a somewhat different place now, as I work on recording an EP with Adam. I do know that I’m not the best I’ll ever be, if I continue to learn and practice what I learn, but I also know that I have a stronger instrument than I’ve ever had, and I’m (usually) proud of it. If someone tried to tell me I shouldn’t be trying to record an EP at this point in my journey, I could confidently tell them that I’m ready to do it now. I want to do it now.

I lean into that when I love my voice. I’m not doing this for them, I’m doing this for me. I’m doing something I love. And that is the thing that matters right now.

I’ve also learned something else over the years, and that is that my voice, my words, my music, affect other people.¹ The kinds of comments that I’ve received in recent years have branched out from the “You could be a professional someday!” of my younger days. Sometimes I let myself believe that people really want to hear myvoice, my songs.

I lean into that when I hate my voice. I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing this for them. I will do my best for them. And that is the thing that matters right now.

So when I love my voice, I sing for me, and when I don’t love my voice, I sing for someone else. No matter what, I don’t stop singing.

I think I could extend this idea to other places in my life, as well as seeing where neglecting one side of the equation has hurt me. For example, reading. I used to tear through books. I remember one March Break (a very long time ago) I read two Hardy Boys books every single day. I used to read books when I was eating, when I was walking home from school, when I was in class (yep, got in trouble for that one). I’ve stayed up all night finishing Discworld books. But at some point, reading became more difficult for me. It was hard to focus long enough to read long passages. So I restricted it to things I had to read. A chapter in a textbook. The news. A journal article. Even these blog posts, I struggle to proof-read for myself. It takes me months to finish a book, if I do it at all. I dedicate my scant focus to reading things for someone else, instead of reading things for me. I don’t love reading anymore, to be honest, even though in my heart of hearts I still think of myself as a bookworm. Maybe bringing the same spirit of “just don’t stop doing it” from singing to reading would help me. Maybe reading the things I love, for myself, would bring some of the joy back even if it doesn’t get easier. Maybe it would get easier. I don’t know.

I do know that I came back to music, though. And I’m never letting it go again. Whether I sing for myself or for someone else, I’m not going to stop.

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¹ When I was younger, making people cry when I sang was a special point of pride.