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1:03pm April 12, 2012

My voice

My voice had an undertone to it. Sometimes it was barely detectable. Sometimes it was pronounced. I could never hear it unless I was listening to myself on tape. I thought that it must be the way nobody likes their voice on tape. Except nobody else’s voice on tape had that undertone.

It was the same dull sound people made when they said ‘duuuhhhhhhh’ and 'retaahhhhhhd’. Or when they mimicked someone they were trying to make sound stupid.

I worked hard to get rid of it. I recorded myself over and over again trying to figure out what to do. It involved tightening things. Tightening lots of things, things that I mostly couldn’t be bothered to tighten when I was also trying to speak or sing. I guess some muscle in there is loose most of the time and how loose it is determines how much of the undertone you hear.

One day my dad was talking to me, and he repeated something I said. I lashed out at him. I think I screamed at him. He was bewildered. I tried to tell him, “You’re using that voice people use for stupid people.” I don’t remember if the words actually made it out of my mouth, or if so, whether they were changed in some way from my original intent. Whatever I said, his response was just, “But I was just talking the way you actually sound.”

I couldn’t take that in and I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t figure out why he was lying to me about my voice. But I heard things from other people. Spontaneously. “You talk like your mouth is full of rocks,” a stranger said when I was twelve.

And then, a year or two ago, maybe three. I heard a recording of another person’s voice. And I heard it. Sometimes unmistakable, other times subtle, but always there. Her voice had that undertone. That exact undertone. With the exact same range from barely audible to quite pronounced.

So it wasn’t just the tape recorder effect. So my father wasn’t lying to me. Neither were all the other people who said weird things over the years about my voice. It all made actual sense. Which was, weirdly, a relief. So I really sound like that. And I think by now I might not actually care. Which would be good, because I spent most of my life terrified of that sound.