Trusting One's Own Voice--no thugs need apply

I think you heard the lady!

 Listen! I went to the ENT last week because I realized that when I was reading The Raven out loud to my juniors, I actually sounded like The RAVEN--it was disconcerting. I reminded myself of the old lady named Mrs. Smoke that used to live behind the church on our block. She used to holler at us kids for simple things (like throwing corn cobs into her yard--yeah, Kath, you know who I'm talkin' about), and I could do a pretty swell imitation of her. 

The trouble is....I don't want to sound like Mrs. Smoke. I want to sound like Grace Kelly... well, that's beside the point...no that really is the point I think....so I went to Dr. Gupta to find out what in the world is making my voice break like Katherine Hepburn calling to Henry Fonda about the loons in On Golden Pond. 
 Now Sanjay Gupta is more than a simple ENT. Sanjay is an Otorolaryngologist, which if my bill is anything as imposing as his official title I'll end up owing something just short of the National Deficit after my insurance company pays.

So anyway, after sitting with a string of ether-filled cotton ball up my nose for 45 minutes, Dr. Gupta hoves it out again, and then while crooning, "Just relax, just breathe through your mouth,"  shoves a laser camera through the little rubber flapper in the roof of my mouth to "get a peak" at my vocal chords. Then 7.3 minutes later, Sanjay Gupta whips that flexible tubing out of my nose faster than a garter snake running from an 8-year-old boy and tells me something I didn't want to hear (that is..other than my own gag reflex). He says, all calm and smiling, "Sure enough, you have two nodules on

your vocal chords."

"What?" says I. "What does that mean?"

And then Dr. Gupta points to his computer screen, showing me how my larynx is  engaging every other member in the area to help vocalize.

You're not trusting your own voice," he says. "You're overcompensating by using other muscles to back you up."

It is at this point in the blog that I would like to stop, and for the sake of my own self preservation, simply cease to expose my lifelong shortcomings. But the metaphor is just too good to pass up, don't you think? I mean, I don't want to sound all supernatural or anything, but when your very own body gives you something this ripe, it's hard to let it simply rot on the vine.

Now I'm no Owen Meany, but I can't imagine a life of quiet. A life of channeling Julie Andrews,  speaking into classroom microphone headsets, tipping my head slightly to the left with an ever-so-gentle smile and and saying things like, "Young ladies and gentlemen, would you honor me with your silence, please?" Nope--can't see it. I'm a yeller, a screamer, a bellower. Why....by the age of three my family had nicknamed me "leather lungs" because my mom never had to wonder in which part of the house, the yard or the neighborhood I was; she simply followed the sound.

But I'm avoiding the obvious. Or maybe if you aren't a lover of metaphor, it's the unobvious I'm avoiding--but either way--I simply can't ignore it any longer. Look. Here's the deal. When we have hangups in life.....our bodies find a way, ultimately, of letting us know. There it is. I've said it.

For instance, when I was in my early 20's, I developed a severe eye infection after my divorce that made my eye swell up so badly I couldn't wear contacts. Even after the virus had cleared up, my lid drooped so badly I walked around looking like Rocky Balboa after the 9th round with Apollo Creed. Finally, after nearly half a year, I looked at myself in the mirror and said "eye left" and then began to sob as if I was still sitting in the pew after my father's funeral. It was only at that moment that I started dealing with the severe abandonment issues that I had developed after a horrific divorce that followed hard on the heels of my father's death.

Too corny? I think not. Take this one for instance. When I was in high school I was a ski freak. I went to the mountains every weekend from the time the rocks were barely covered until the last slush melted into the earth. After accidentally stepping on a toothpick the day after Thanksgiving, I refused to admit to being disabled in order to hit the slopes (which were opening uncharacteristically early). Although the toothpick had been driven nearly its full length into the ball of my foot, I simply had my mother yank it out--the quarter inch that did come out, that is--and convinced her it had gone in broken. 
   What I needed to do was tell tell her how much pain I was in--what I ended up doing was catching an edge on that injured foot and severing my ACL. But do you think I told anybody how badly my knee, which was blown up the size of a small child's head, hurt? No, that what I needed to do, but I did not.
  What I needed was an orthopedic specialist--what I did was to wrap it in an Ace bandage and ski the rest of the season. When I finally DID see a doctor the following summer he said, "If you had tended to your knee when it first happened, we could have simply reattached the ligament. But by denying your injury, it caused the ligament to atrophy away." Well, metaphor scoffers, I know this...a lifetime denying one's pain and not tending to one's knee(d)s will make one a liar and ascetic of the worst sort--it will cause the worst kind of atrophy possible......atrophy of VOICE. (See how I, like Owen Meany, feel the need to yell it here?)

So....back to Dr. Gupta. Here I am screeching like Mrs. Smoke, and what I'd really like to be is the kind of strong, assertive, woman who carries off a scene with beauty and grace (ah yes, back to my Grace Kelly allusion).

  When Gupta pulled out this most recent piece of medical advice, I decided to listen...not to the doctor, but to the metaphor my own body had provided. WHEN, I thought to myself, HAVE I ever trusted my own voice? (Dang it, there's Owen Meany again!) And what would it sound like if I DID? I've blistered my vocal chords from hours of "over-compensation," huge attempts to sound big, to command attention to "cover the room" as the jovial doctor put it. (Sounds like a comedy act to me? Anybody else?)

Well, sometimes a metaphor is just too powerful to ignore--and this, it appears, is one of those........sometimes we need to quit blabbing and listen to what our own physical bodies are telling us.

 I am a writer. I write books and stories, and songs, and they are good. I want to produce a play from a novella I wrote called The Friendly Beasts, and next week I'm going to talk to a composer to arrange the songs I've written to go with it. I've developed stories called Elderbooks that are picture books for the elderly who can no longer read. I am finishing a novel about a woman who gives birth to her own sister, and I have short stories I want to publish in magazines and journals around the world.

Oh, and I write this blog. In fact, I realize that I haven't spoken but six-and-a-half words since beginning this entry, and it doesn't take a PhD in literature to realize that when one writes one doesn't use one's vocal chords. 

 I've spent my life as a teacher trying to "cover the room," as Gupta put it--waiting for somebody to give me permission and authority (the muscle part of the metaphor, as it were for those of you who aren't getting it) to speak into this world as an artist and a writer. 
Well, this week, I'm going to make my first attempt at covering the world with my words--to trust my real voice. It's what I want. In fact, it's what I need, (okay....plus just a little bit of grace to do it).  Oh, and P.S. no thugs need apply--I'm doing this one on my own.

11/8/10--an addendum: I just have to add this little bit of life coincidence. Today I listened to a guest speaker who quoted Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers. Here's what he has to say, and I think he said it better than I did: 

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs (1955 -)

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