This is My Voice
This is my voice.
I am walking to the microphone, the first time in months, to sing live. The people before me are not random strangers, and no one is paying to be there. It is a hot day, and we have all of us — my fellow voice students, their friends and family — gathered in the outside parking lot of a BBQ joint to perform.
I hear my name and pull myself up from the folding chair. As I get closer to the mic, I repeat my mantra — the one that has accompanied each and every voice lesson I signed up for in this pandemic year. “This is my voice. This is my voice. This is my voice.” It is the rush of words I yell out in loud and nasal tones when my voice teacher tries to coax a sound from me. “This is my voice,” I repeat, half singsong, half-nasal — not pretty, more affirmation — than melodic.
But as I get closer to that stage, every part of me screams otherwise. I look beyond the mic before me and the voice I hear says loudly, I don’t belong here. I have no voice.
It is an old trope — one so familiar to me through years of multiple other short-trips to a stage and mic before me.
A memory comes back to me from many years before. I am a 20-something ascending to another stage and another set of lights. I am in a performing class of people — some pro, some aspiring, and some like me, not sure why I am there. I hear my name, and I climb the stairs up to the small stage, looking out at the people before me. And I am stuck — deer-in-the-headlights stuck. The lyrics to the song I’ve practiced countless times at home in front of my mirror with ease and feeling and passion escape me. I freeze. “The flowers, the linens, the crystal I see, are carefully chosen for people like me. The music is muted, the lighting is low, but where are you, dear friend.”
I repeat the chorus. I lose the melody. “Where are you, dear friend… where are you, dear friend?” And in that moment, I don’t know where I am. I am so totally lost. I look out. Eyes averted. I barely get through it, the music stops. I safely retreat to my chair in the theater.
I want to leave. But I am too ashamed. Instead, I sit and watch the next performer, Abby, bound up the stairs.
“Take me now, baby, here as I am. Pull me close, try and understand…” she sings out. She is off-key, off pitch. Her voice, small and squeezed and nasal. But as I look around the room, all eyes are on her — riveted, even. I think to myself, Abby cannot sing and yet, and yet, she commands that stage. She believes she belongs there. And so, as she finds the notes to that final chorus, “Because the night was made for us,” all of us, even me, we believe her.
Now I bring myself back to the here-and-now moment of it — the hot day and that mic suspended before me in that parking lot-cum-performing space. I look out and see those eyes, all gazes upon me. This is just a singing recital on an early spring day outside of a BBQ joint. Still, I am here to channel my best Abby.
And so I start. “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” I feel myself floating above those notes as I ease into my second song, “Love has no pride.” As I start, some notes dip, and some fall flat, but so, too, do some soar. This is my voice.
This is my voice. It is the same voice that had brought me so many years earlier, an intrepid 19-year-old, to NYC with a big suitcase filled with gall and dreams and possibilities. It is the same voice that has carried me through love and loss and new love again. It is the same voice that has released me, and transported me, and comforted me through heartbreak and joy, as I sang out loudly and without fear with Laura and Aretha, Bonnie and Linda.
This year, when people ask me what I did during this time of isolation and restraint, all masked up and hidden, I tell them without hesitation. I found my voice. This is my voice. This is my voice. This IS my voice, and I belong here.
