I’ve been having a hard time writing lately. Things in my life have been going at full speed for awhile, and I haven’t been able to pump the brakes and breathe. Most of these things are amazing—I adopted a dog and he’s the best! My apartment has brand new floors! A new roommate moves in today!—but haven’t been without their complications and frustrations (especially on the apartment front). It’s been hard to find the time to sit down and write if I’m not getting paid for it. Because capitalism dictates that I must work first, lest I end up hungry and homeless. So tending to myself tends to fall to the bottom of every list.
With everything going on, it’s felt like there’s no space in my brain for…me. Everyone else’s needs have come before my own. And that’s OK—life does that to all of us, sometimes—until it isn’t. It’s felt selfish to need time to write in almost any capacity, but particularly in my normal, routine ways. My morning pages were the first thing to go when my life filled up with external obligations. And I realized recently how much this new practice has been anchoring me in my sense of confidence and self.
I need this space in order to work the muscle that is me. My voice. My inner thoughts and feelings—both the ones I share, and those I don’t. Writing is how I know what I feel, how I think, and why. And if I don’t know those things, how can I possibly expect to exist in the world being wholly myself? I would be lost otherwise. And I have been, many times over, when I don’t allow myself the space to hear myself.
This is also connected to singing.
Words and music are the same to me. Cadence, rhythm, tone: emotional subtlety and true meaning—purposefully eschewed or otherwise—are all determined by how a word is delivered. Not just in what was said, but how it is said. When it is said. Or not said. Silence can contain just as much music as noise.
My first foray into writing that wasn’t a class project were song lyrics. In 3rd grade, I wrote a song called “I’m Gonna,” the chorus of which went like this:
I’m gonna go get me a new baby, yeah
I’m gonna go get me a new sweetheart, boy
I’m gonna go get me away from you
’Cuz you weren’t like this before
I remember the moment I wrote it, sitting in the hallway outside of class, but I remember the moment I shared it with my two best friends at the time, Brittany and Tahari, most. Tahari’s response to the song is really what sticks out. She screamed—she frequently screamed; she had a roster of joyfully, full-bodied screams for every occasion—and jumped up and sang it right back to me. It was a hit, she cried! The three of us all loved to sing and perform. We were even going to become a girl group maybe. One day. The following year we sang “Waterfalls” by TLC at the 4th grade talent show. I did the Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes rap. There’s video of it…somewhere. But I’m sure you can imagine the truly hilarious scene that was three 4th grade girls in suburban Connecticut singing a song about AIDs to a gymnasium full of elementary school kids and their parents.
I still remember the melody of “I’m Gonna,” and I have been occasionally known to sing it for friends if they ask, but mostly eschew it in favor of changing the subject.
Singing was why I started to write for myself. Music gave me the vocabulary and the space to feel my feelings, and singing allowed me to express so many of the myriad things that were held within me—feelings I was often told were “too much” or “not right” or misguided. I shouldn’t feel the way I was feeling, or I should get over it. Or I was wrong to feel that way—selfish and bad. This is what I learned about feelings and emotions. Which made singing from a place filled with them that much harder to bare.
It’s funny, I’ve been trying to write about singing and music for awhile now, for several reasons. It’s caused me to face a lot of fears I have around “really” singing. As in, using my real voice, not just a half-assed or mimicked voice—which is usually what I do, even at karaoke, the rare times I actually go when invited. My friends have remarked on more than one occasion with surprise, “you’re so good!” but I often demure. I’m sure this makes me look like an asshole fishing for further compliment, but really it’s just that while I know that, yeah, sure, what I just did was probably good, it wasn’t how good it could be. If I’d really allowed myself to go all-in and perform, if I could’ve sung the song in the right key for me.
But I’m scared of being fully seen in that way. It feels so vulnerable, so intimate. I’m afraid of the attention that comes when I give full effort to anything and am not scared of the power of my own voice.
[Pause for the metaphorical and the literal to sloppily kiss for a second.]
I’m also just really fucking annoying about singing. I can really be such a picky, judgmental little cunt about it. Singing criticism is where my Most Capricorn Elements arise. Because I know how things should sound and be done on an innate AND technical level, and I have the tools to back it up. I used to be a real fucking professional about my voice and singing. I wasn’t just good, I was fucking great, as a now-successful casting director once said to a mutual friend.
And it’s a great fucking tragedy of my life that I gave up on it in the service of not being “too much.”
Growing up, when I had big feelings, I was often sequestered alone “to calm down.” I just needed some space, my mother would insist, even when that was absolutely not what I wanted or needed. But any sign of feeling or emotion was shut down in my family—frequently by force. We never talked. About anything. And whenever this happened, deeper into myself I would slide; down, down, down into a swirling darkness, where all my “bad feelings” (aka, any and all feelings) came to die, rot, and fester. Inside, a deeply guarded wound was born.
But music helped. And singing really helped. In singing, I found a release. When I was singing, I was allowed to feel and showcase any and all of my feelings. It was a safe channel into which I could funnel everything. So I did, and wow did it fucking make a difference. Holy shit. So many people told me I was really good at singing. Emoting in that way made me feel powerful. I could bring grown adults—strangers!—to tears, with my voice and lyrics, and I regularly did. I had a natural gift, people told me. I just needed to learn how to control it. And I was desperate to learn, because nothing felt better than singing and performing. Nothing else made sense in my brain and body. Self-control was something I’d long chased, mostly out of a desire of acceptance and love from others. Control made me resentful and untethered, as I often equated it with lessening myself. But not when it came to singing and songwriting. When it came to singing, learning control made me feel like a freer, more confident version of myself. And it showed.
My grandmother paid for me to take voice lessons for two years during middle school. I remember feeling tremendous guilt and gratitude towards as I watched her write the check. I think it was $125 a month, which felt so expensive to me in 1999/2000 (and I’m sure it was). But for an hour each Thursday after school, my grandmother would drive me over to Karen Wagner’s house and I would do my scales and sing my songs. I would practice breath-work and pitch-matching and belting and vibrato. I would, and could, do it all. And it made me so happy. It made so many people happy (but not everybody happy). It was the only time I felt like I made sense.
There was one audition I remember in particular. I hadn’t really prepared as I heard about it last minute, but I’d recently sung the song “No One Knows Who I Am” from the musical Jekyll & Hyde during one of my voice lessons. So I sang it a cappella to a room full of waiting fellow auditioners and their parents (as well as the director of the musical).
The mother of a small boy came up to me after, actually teary-eyed, telling me what a beautiful voice I had. Saying I must have spent hours preparing. My mother’s voice in my head booms loudly, “You think you’re so much better than us, don’t you, Alicia?” I cringe.
I was recruited by where I went to college for performing and theater. But knowing that I would be paying for the bulk of college myself—through a combination of predatory student loans, financial aide, work study, and being a resident assistant on campus—I couldn’t bring myself to actually go through with the program and “pay money to play dress up,” as I frequently repeated at the time. (Self-hatred was becoming my primary language projection-y cudgel.)
I settled into a much more “sensible” degree: English (lol). Writing stories, and poems, and dissecting literature…it was basically what I was already doing while reading, or songwriting, or performing in a musical anyway. Only with an English degree, I could be a teacher. Or a lawyer. Maybe I could even get into marketing. Something adult. Something practical. A “real job” that honored who I was—“you’re so goddamned good with words, Alicia. You should do something with words with your life!” my grandfather would often proclaim while drinking—but also set me up for financial success as an independent adult. And lord knows I was desperate to be an independent adult. For a long time I thought I could be that independent adult by making money from singing, writing, and performing. I had talent, after all, and I was hardworking and smart. Wasn’t that ehough?
It was never going to be enough, my mother would regularly tell me. We weren’t rich people, we weren’t an artistic family. It was always very clear that I would never be supported and accepted by my family (or at least by my mother) unless I got a “real job.” That if I followed my heart towards the arts, I would be a shameful mark upon the family, some sort of needy, delusional leech the rest of them would have to support. And I really, really wanted them to love and accept me and not be a leech they had to support. It already felt like it was such a burden to them that they had to be my family and therefore in my general proximity on the regular. I couldn’t bare the thought of feeling like such a helpless, delusional parasite on top.
I only wish I’d realized back then that I was asking for an acceptance I was never going to get. I was asking for something so many of them couldn’t even give themselves. For as wild and independently minded as I am, I’ve also spent a lot of my life trying to live my life by their point of view and standards—to “compromise” in some way so they feel seen and heard—and the trying has only made things immeasurably worse. For all of us.
So when it came to college, I closed up my creative shop. No more singing. No more songwriting. Poems were OK so long as they were class-mandated. But otherwise? I knew I had to put that side of me to bed. And so I slowly killed the part of me that made me, well, me. I allowed myself to lose my voice.
I’ve not really felt like myself since.
I recently went on a date with a man who loves to sing. He has told me that he knows he isn’t particularly good at it, but it fills him up to do it. He’s in a singing group with a bunch of middle aged ladies, and it seems like he has a great time embracing something he calls “wholesome as fuck,” which I found disarming. He wants to sing together, he tells me, after I admit that I used to sing. I freeze up at this text admission, fielding a mix of cringe and ick at the earnestness of it all, a not-small fear that I might enjoy it and doing so would make me like this person more (scary, dangerous), and more than a few passing thoughts about whether or not this man is a total dweeb, egomaniac, or maybe just grew up in a cult. I hate how intrigued I am. I want to find reasons to push the nice man who I know will be nice to me, away. So naturally, I panic, and text my cousin and a friend. They both tell me to chill the fuck out about it and let a man be nice to me, for once.
Since going on a whole “fix your life” journey over the past year plus, I’ve been singing more “for real” in the comfort of my empty home as I work on putting it all back together. (The metaphors really abound here, huh?) Occasionally when my roommate is around I will let a bit of the real voice take over. Sometimes when the singing feels particularly good to me, I panic that I’m going to elicit a response. And any response would be scary. One night, while singing along to some early Amy Winehouse, I started to cry: I heard my voice again. My full-throated, unashamed, loud and excellently emotive voice was coming out of my body again, for the first time in what felt like ages.
It’s the emotion that I expose in myself when I sing that scares me the most. Because I know my emotions have real power when I express them—for better and so often for worse. I’m reminded of a whole monologue I went on about Jean Grey of the X-Men and the disservice people constantly do to her character’s portrayal because they have no idea how to dig into her interiority and really bring her to life on screen. It is only ever about her in the context of other people, never Jean in juxtaposition to herself. It was on a podcast a few years ago called Screen Drafts. It doesn’t matter (unless someone wants to pay me to write the Jean Grey story done right), but I remember feeling very overwhelming when I finished, and the men I was podcasting with didn’t feel all that sure about how to respond.
The point is, is exposing interiority is bone-chillingly terrifying. It is for everyone. It feels so intimate and vulnerable—scarier and more exposing than someone seeing you naked and orgasming. Because when people can really see the inside of you, that’s when they have to power to do their worst. And when I really sing, you are seeing the emotional core of me, you can see every last wound-able area. Ones I probably don’t even know about. Or at least that’s how it feels. Because all of those experiences and feelings and emotions exist in my voice when I sing. It is the source of my power and me at my most vulnerably exposed.
When I have used my voice in the past, it’s caused me great pain. It’s evoked great pain to others. And I’m not just talking about singing.
But my voice has also brought joy and catharsis. Sometimes in the very same moments it brings pain. And I cannot live as a human without all of that, because that is at the complicated, beautiful heart of existing. Singing, writing, existing, owning, and living in the truth of this voice will always have both. A spectrum of it all, if you will. That is life’s very essence. In metaphor, it’s universal. I just have to do my best to stay true to my voice as a part of the whole of it: witness it and the voices of others, and learn and grow and better shape and wield it. I think that’s, ultimately, what we’re all trying to do, no?
My grandmother always used to say to me “don’t try, just do.” And I never really understood the difference between trying and doing. “Isn’t doing just trying, though?” I would retort, feeling mealy-mouthed as I said it even then. But I get it now: when you try, you’re hedging, in a way. You’re not fully committed because you know you’re still unsure. You’re learning.
But sometimes we don’t have the opportunity to learn first. We learn in the doing. And to do something, you have to fully commit to it before you know what the fuck is going on. You have to dive in and just go. Be. Do. Ride the wave. You’re not observing on the peripheral as much as when you’re trying. When you’re doing, you’re in it, you’re going, and every part of you is working in tandem. Doing is full-bodied, full-throated stuff. It is singing at the top of your lungs, once more with feeling. Trying is a whisper while you practice. It’s not work, it’s pre-work. And really living takes work.
I’m so glad I’m doing now instead of trying. Trying can be…trying. I used to be such a try-hard. I tried so hard to make the voices I’d internalized sing like mine! And for awhile, you know, I was moderately successful at it. I think lots of people could convince themselves that this is how you make a pleasing melody and find your voice, at least for a little while. Especially if you’re constantly told that your voice is too loud and too much and needs too much attention.
Cornily enough, I feel my voice getting stronger with every stroke of the key, every moment I decide to take up space and show my “too much-ness” off. I can hear the voice in my head saying these words, humming a melody, ready to break out into song, getting louder. My song. Because that voice is me, and there’s so much strength there if I just let it be. And we all learn the words as we go.