It wasn’t like I ever stopped. I just did it with less care, less precision.
For someone who spent the first 17 years of my life believing with complete confidence that I would grow up and become a professional vocalist, it was a hard landing to realize that:
- I am kinda… lackadaisical sometimes. Being serious about a career in the arts requires both discipline and hustle. I can sometimes muster one or the other, but never yet in my life both simultaneously.
- I did not prepare adequately for the possibility of college. Having no one in my immediate family who went to college, I didn’t know how student loans worked. I assumed you either had family well off enough to pay for you or you had to get scholarships. I could have, in theory, gotten some but my grades were… not great. See above.
- I could not see a path to auditioning for operas or other chamber music opportunities without the pipeline of formally studying and obtaining a music degree.
- I have never figured out how to sight read. It will not go in my brain. I have taken years of formal music education AND a separate music theory class to try and overcome this, to no avail. You absolutely must be able to sight read for auditions of this kind.
- I had no notion whatsoever how hard it is to be a gigging musician. I mean, yikes.
By the time all of this hit home, I already had a baby and modified ambitions for my life.
But, it never stopped being true that my voice is my favorite thing about me.
Without the framework of a choir to belong to or any particular reason to train my voice in any organized way it fell into a certain degree of neglect. Not so much that most people could tell. Not so much that I couldn’t smoke everyone else at karaoke. But enough that I could tell.
In the last few years it has become much more pronounced that my voice is not what it used to be. I could still get to all the high notes but my voice didn’t come out flexible and effortless, it came with effort and limitations I had never experienced before. That my asthma medication caused laryngitis only added insult to injury.
It never once occurred to me there could be any other culprit than my own dereliction. I was heartsick about it for a long time, even as I re-trained my head voice and made a point to undertake singing practice regularly. I saw it as another example of my Gifted Child’s Wasted Potential.
And then
About 6 months I started estrogen replacement therapy. After my hysterectomy 10 years we tried it, but there were still endometrial lesions and it immediately made me really sick. This time, my provider reasoned, it had been long enough and with accompanying HRT, I should be able to take it without risk of a recurrence.
How is this relevant, you ask? One of the multitude of symptoms of low estrogen in women is for soft tissue to become less flexible and resilient. You know, like the soft tissue IN MY LARYNX.
Because I once again have the light and dancing quality in my voice that I had lost. It, like of other physical things, doesn’t come as effortlessly as it once did, but as long as I maintain my singing practice, my voice remains the magical creature it used to be.
Now, to work on the ol’ guitar playing…
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