Open topic: Lift your voice/Tog do guth
I have vocal dysmorphia. That's the only explanation I can come up with for how I came through years of singing in showers, in cars on late-night drives on empty roads, drunkenly in bars when the band played loud, in my kitchen dancing through the dish washing, and still believed that I was actively terrible to sing. I mean I would hear myself sing and think, "I think I sound fine, but it must be that thing about how you hear your own voice through the bones and it's different, really I am downright unpleasant to hear."
I sang as a child, burstingly proud to perform song and dance routines with my sister at family gatherings. And then I hit puberty and my self fell apart. During the years I disappeared, I made myself be quiet and still, afraid of all the people judging me for anything I dared to be that caught their attention. I never lifted my voice. Even long after I learned how to talk to people and feel at ease in their company, I never sang for anyone.
Three years ago, I moved home from the city to the country. A year later I started to learn Gaelic again, after not having spoken a word of it since junior high school.
The thing about Gaelic is, everybody can sing in Gaelic. Singing isn't a professional activity. It's what you do whenever a few people get together. So I started joining in on choruses, started learning a few songs. Nobody complained.
Then, nine months ago, I picked up my guitar. I had gotten to be friends with a few new people, all of them musicians, and watching them pass a guitar around made me feel really envious. I took guitar lessons, years ago, but never advanced to the point of playing an actual song. My guitar gathered a lot of dust in corners but I never considered selling it, even when I was broke enough to sell off my DVDs to make rent. I just carried it with me like it was a symbol of dreams deferred.
But this time it was different. Though I struggled to make my fingers form the shapes of chords, I never quit. I play guitar now.
When I started playing, I started singing, too. The dams on music burst inside me and all the little songs I've been secretly making for years came running out, flooding too strong to hide. I started singing for my roommates, for my friends, for people at parties, on stage in a group at a community concert. I'm 32 years old and I feel like I just found a piece of my soul that I never believed existed.
I lift my voice.
Remains:
When the snow drifts up
to the second story window,
we tell stories
or jump, breathless with laughing.
We remember.
They left us the shape of a
nose, a certain way of folding the arms,
an uncertain temper.
We regret they left us and
we regret they left us a fondness for
drink, a fear of change.
We regret what they didn't leave us.
A n'athair a'ha air neamh
See this girl leaning on the car door
in the same exact way
as her great aunt in this picture
from 1953, her right foot on top of her left -
They didn't leave us.
And my poem for the LJ Idol Inconcievable prompt, reworked as a song:
I sang as a child, burstingly proud to perform song and dance routines with my sister at family gatherings. And then I hit puberty and my self fell apart. During the years I disappeared, I made myself be quiet and still, afraid of all the people judging me for anything I dared to be that caught their attention. I never lifted my voice. Even long after I learned how to talk to people and feel at ease in their company, I never sang for anyone.
Three years ago, I moved home from the city to the country. A year later I started to learn Gaelic again, after not having spoken a word of it since junior high school.
The thing about Gaelic is, everybody can sing in Gaelic. Singing isn't a professional activity. It's what you do whenever a few people get together. So I started joining in on choruses, started learning a few songs. Nobody complained.
Then, nine months ago, I picked up my guitar. I had gotten to be friends with a few new people, all of them musicians, and watching them pass a guitar around made me feel really envious. I took guitar lessons, years ago, but never advanced to the point of playing an actual song. My guitar gathered a lot of dust in corners but I never considered selling it, even when I was broke enough to sell off my DVDs to make rent. I just carried it with me like it was a symbol of dreams deferred.
But this time it was different. Though I struggled to make my fingers form the shapes of chords, I never quit. I play guitar now.
When I started playing, I started singing, too. The dams on music burst inside me and all the little songs I've been secretly making for years came running out, flooding too strong to hide. I started singing for my roommates, for my friends, for people at parties, on stage in a group at a community concert. I'm 32 years old and I feel like I just found a piece of my soul that I never believed existed.
I lift my voice.
Remains:
Click to viewWhen the snow drifts up
to the second story window,
we tell stories
or jump, breathless with laughing.
We remember.
They left us the shape of a
nose, a certain way of folding the arms,
an uncertain temper.
We regret they left us and
we regret they left us a fondness for
drink, a fear of change.
We regret what they didn't leave us.
A n'athair a'ha air neamh
See this girl leaning on the car door
in the same exact way
as her great aunt in this picture
from 1953, her right foot on top of her left -
They didn't leave us.
And my poem for the LJ Idol Inconcievable prompt, reworked as a song: