It has come to my attention that my previous post was a bit wordy. Scratch that--my entire writing style is wordy. I'm addicted to lavish similes and monumental adjectives. Why? Because it makes me feel pretty. Not smarter than the rest of you, not classical, but pretty.
The thing is, I'm very wordy on paper. I'm very wordy in my head. I used to be eloquent when I spoke, but things have changed, and it's quite terrifying.
About two weeks ago, I received a condenser microphone that I named Nugget. Nugget is an Audio Technica AT2020 USB+ microphone, and it is the cutest little condenser mic ever! It has superb quality for its price, and hell, it looks like a high-tech black nugget.
Anyway, I was recording songs on Nugget. I was amazed at the quality, but cringed when I heard my voice in stunning clarity, and tried to mix it. Wow, I was so out of sync with myself! How was it that I managed to get three different pitches for one note, every time I sang it? I listened to a few tracks that were just like it, in order to compare (okay, fine, I listened to professional tracks with Autotune and flawless mixing), and determined that my voice was undoubtedly the most disgusting abomination of a sound that had ever dared to exist on this Earth.
That week also happened to be when my talent show submissions were due (I wanted to submit a piece I wrote, but did not finish in time) and when the season's first robotics competition was, meaning that I was to be at robotics every night that week. I imploded under the stress and did the thing I had to do over the thing I wanted to do. You know, the usual for teens with high expectations.
And it was great! My robotics team won the event. I gained a little more respect in my team. My mental health was fine; I had story ideas for Wattpad but not enough time to write them, so I scrawled down the ideas in an unpublished work, so that I could return to them when I had time. I did this on top of high school and college classes, and made it through all my days without any mental breakdowns!
That is, until I lost the ability to speak cohesively.
What?
The one thing I didn't do in these two weeks was write or sing. Ableton sat unopened for two weeks as my song collected dust. I barely opened Memo, where I keep my lyrics, and when I did, I shut it again. Sure, I discovered the album Stars Dance, but its melodies stayed within my earbuds. I stopped making song references (see "Breaking Out Into Song And Dance"). I didn't even sing in the shower.
Why? I was busy. And other things.
I had heard my voice through Nugget and thought that my dream was hopeless. Listening to Selena Gomez meant that the song in my head was out of my range. It had been so long since I sang that going back to it would be out of guilt.
So, I didn't sing. I didn't write. I wrote a lot of books, and figured that my passions were changing.
I went back to robotics, a toxic environment where I have to fight like a dog in order to get the opportunity to do what I paid thousands of dollars to do. Speaking to my programming nemesis, a crazy-skilled, blond Neanderthal who spent almost thirty hours a week at robotics and refused to let anyone else touch a computer, I found that my speech was chopped up. I wanted to tell him a great idea of mine. Instead, I, uh...fuck, the word just left my mind. Where was I? [awkward silence] uh, I wanted to tell you something, what was it...oh! Right! I wanted to tell you a, uh, [volume drops] a great idea.
That was natural to not be able to speak to a terrifying control-freak, right? It was a little infuriating for my feminist and empowering nature, but I could handle it. It was perfectly normal.
Well, then it started happening with my friends. I was given the perfect opportunity to make a roundabout reference to the song "Year 3000" (my friends were hypothesizing that, in the future, people would live underwater, like the chorus of the song also predicts). But, I couldn't. I started it, then trailed off and capped it with a "nevermind." After that, all my sentences became difficult. I was speaking like a Mountain Dew addict (that may seem like a weird simile, until you meet the chemistry teacher at my old school).
I asked my sister about it, because I can't keep secrets from her and I'm done trying. We determined that I had lost my confidence.
Let me explain.
For most of my life, I have been told that I can't sing, because for most of my life, I couldn't. The problem was that I was an alto, and all the music I listened to was way out of my range because I'm gay and only ever want to sing to female artists (or Justin Bieber, who is also out of my range in his modern upper notes). The instant I joined in, my voice was strained and out of tune, because I never practiced. On top of that, my mother tried to teach me in fifth grade how to sing, and forced opera music on me. At the time, I liked it because it symbolized our bond. But it was opera music, which meant large ranges, non-pop singing styles, and my mother's insistent need for vibrato. Soon, singing became a constant rain of "do this," "do that," "that's wrong," "no, that's bad," and the subsequent feelings of embarrassment started popping up on their own. I joined band and didn't sing for another few years, until I started writing music and wanted to invert the typical boast of "write my own checks like I write what I sing." By then, singing had become synonymous with overcoming what other people thought of me, being myself, and having confidence in my abilities. Of course I didn't sing.
I started singing at the tender age of fifteen, about ten years after most good singers. The breakthrough came when I got into Miley Cyrus music, twelve years after she started making it, and realized that low-pitched, husky singers could be successful. It also had the added benefit of disproving my learned opinion that what my mother said was bad was indisputably and unquestioningly bad.
Singing became my confidence. It takes a certain amount of strength to loudly and musically declare to your family, "Everyone in line in the bathroom/ tryna get a line in the bathroom." So, when I stopped, I lost that confidence. I stopped sticking up for myself and believing in my opinion.
Looks like I have no choice. Once I stop being so busy, it's back to singing for me.
