We’ve been sick for much of this month so far. And it’s the worst kind of sick, the kind that affects your voice.
As of this writing, I haven’t been able to sing for more than a week.
I rely heavily on singing to get me through my life. I sing in the shower, which is just about the only way for me to get through a shower without coming out the other side clean-but-miserable. I sing in the car, to keep myself both calm and focused on the task at hand. I sing to write new songs. I sing to remember how old songs go. I sing to keep songs in my head. I sing to practice. I sing when I feel happy, I sing when I feel sad. I sing when I’m busy and when I’m bored. In short, on an average day, I sing kind of a lot.
When I can’t sing, I don’t know what to do with myself. And to be honest, I am truly awful at vocal rest, so even though I know perfectly well I should be resting my voice to protect it, I keep testing, and pushing, and ignoring the fact that I can’t hit the notes I’m aiming at. Instead of spending the last week being gentle with my voice so that I have a chance to heal, I’ve spent it checking to see if I have my voice back yet. And then, on finding that I haven’t, I’ve checked to see if it will come back if I just keep trying.
I can still feel the feeling that I felt in 1997 when I heard that an operation had cost Julie Andrews her voice. It was partly at the thought of Julie Andrews never singing again, but most of it was the gut-clenching sensation of realizing that it was possible to lose your voice. I would have been twelve or thirteen at the time, and the very idea of never being able to sing again was devastating.
You’d think this would be plenty of incentive to manage the vocal rest I should be engaging in now, but I will have you know… I’ve always been a scab-picker.
I hurt myself a fair bit as a kid. I’ve still got a scar on one knee from tripping in the school baseball diamond. And I never was able to just leave things alone to heal. I wanted to know what was going on underneath the scab. I still do, to be honest. It is a flaw.
And yet, that same inability to resist picking at things has served me very well when it comes to decoding my particular mental health struggles. I can’t stop wondering why my life looks like this and why I can’t seem to make it look like that. It’s not the fact that I’m a little unusual, it’s the reasons behind it. And I don’t think my blog posts would be as exciting (I think they’re exciting) if I failed to engage critically with my reports of what it’s like to be mentally disordered. I would just be typing lists of symptoms.
With that in mind, I should probably be asking myself why my voice is frustrating me so very much right now, and I think the answer is, in fact, because I’m not resting it. I am reasonably certain that I am prolonging my suffering by picking at the scab. I need to just stick a Band-Aid on it and leave it alone. Lest I give myself vocal nodes. (And I’m not talking about vocal nodes. Some people would rather not read about spiders, I would rather not read about vocal nodes. That’s that.)
So I think I’m going to cut out of this blog post a little early1 and go have myself a well-earned nap. That way I have at least a fifty-fifty chance of getting some vocal rest.
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1 Not even a single footnote yet! Oh – damn.
I may be the tiniest bit biased¹ but I think this is one of your bestest posts. Perhaps not in the subject matter of you feeling sick, and the worry about when you will be able to sing properly, but it was an interesting perspective on how your diagnosis impacts your life in what, for most people, would feel like an annoyance to be waited out.
I hope you are feeling better this week and will be able to singing around your nest soon.
¹ okay, maybe more than tiniest