On Getting Older and My Voice

Tomorrow is my birthday. It’s not a milestone birthday, just an everyday sort of birthday (29), but as markings of time go, I find birthdays more important to me than January 1sts for considering beginnings and ends. This year especially marks: the first time that I will be single in nearly a decade, not yet having my PhD completed though I’ve been in my program for five years, and the just perceptible shift in my understanding that I’m supposed to start dreading getting older, rather than thrilling to it as I did in the birthdays at the beginning of this decade.

My new status as single is something I may write about more in a month or two—just reflections on the end of relationships and how to say “I gambled, I lost, and it’s okay.” To sublimate shared songs and memories as part of life and growth rather than to rip them all out and light them on fire.

My new status as single is also why I’ve been so neglectful of you, my readers (and listeners!) of late. For that, I am truly sorry, but I hope you’ll understand that unraveling one life these last few months has taken a lot of time and energy that I’d normally devote to you. Soon, I hope, that can begin again.

For now, though, as I’ve thought of aging, growing, becoming, I am thinking of my voice. My metaphorical voice, sure, but also my literal one. In another, braver life, I would have become a professional singer. I still call myself a singer, or vocalist, but it’s something I do for fun from time to time. One of the strange things of being trained in singing is the sense that you are playing your body—your vocal chords, your palette, even your nasal cavities—like an instrument. I know, more or less, where I will feel a note resonate. For the lowest notes, I must relax and let them drop down into me. If I fear that a note might go flat, or if I wish to make it brighter, I channel the air to resonate more in the spaces below my eyes. The tone of my voice, even, is a thing both naturally determined and created and changeable.

As a girl, I was a soprano with a three-octave range. I was trained classically, and most time was spent on my “head” voice, or falsetto. It was only around 14 that I realized my real power came from my “chest” voice, the voice I speak with. In high school, I switched from Italian arias to jazz and blues, a soprano to a contralto. I relearned my instrument.

I was reflecting on this change yesterday while listening to a past episode of This American Life. “Me Minus Me” considers who we are when something that we believe to be fundamental about ourselves changes. In one of the stories, a transman decides to begin testosterone despite knowing that it means losing his 3-octave, bright soprano range. He records himself before beginning treatment and many months later when he has begun to feel more at home in his new voice, even recording duets with his past self. He relearns the thing that makes him, him.

For my voice, the relearning was not so dramatic. My soprano was not so lived in, and was always a fleeting thing. I no longer possess three-octaves. But one of the joys of being a contralto is knowing that my voice will continue to become richer. As a teen I was told that I would not hit my peak until my 40s. At that point, as a teen, that felt horribly far off and unfair, as if I was singing with a handicap when compared to the lyric sopranos around me.

Now, as I have felt my voice deepen and color over the years, I think of it as something that is innately me because I both control it and don’t. I enjoy my voice as it is, and look forward to it changing. As a woman, and a woman who has been told that she is beautiful, I am aware that I am supposed to fear aging. I am pale and have lived in the South most of my life, so I’m fighting a rapidly losing battle against skin discoloration and fine lines. And as someone newly single, I cannot help but see myself with new eyes, judgmental eyes, even if only for a second before I remind myself that I am fine as I am. More people have asked me how I’ve felt about this birthday than ever before, wondering if being on the cusp of 30 will make me panic. I notice my stylist clipping away the white hairs that don’t behave unbidden, though I’ve always felt fine about going gray, looked forward, even, to the silver of my father, aunt, and grandmother.

My voice, though, can only get better. It is wood furniture, copper candlesticks, enriched by patina rather than worn down. Last week, I went alone to a little cafe with a jazz band that lets people sign up to join in on songs. I sat at a table until the music started, and when they called my name, I sang Chet Baker’s “It’s Always You.” I started off a little rocky, but hit my stride in the second verse. There was some nice applause, and then I left the stage and a guitarist took his turn.

I am thinking about my voice because it is my life: I can both control it and cannot. I can keep it in shape, can lighten or deepen it, but there are limits: to its upper and lower ends, to the actual quality of it. It quickly reflects each day (if I am tired, if I have talked too much, if the pollen is too heavy), but also reflects years. A few months ago, I performed live a song I hadn’t performed since high school. Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” is technically tremendously difficult, with few clear patterns (no traditional verse, chorus, verse form), but I’ve kept singing it to myself for years. It’s a song that I feel moving through me more or less without thinking. But the song changed for me. At 18, I’d never been in a romantic relationship or really dated. I was just becoming used to my contralto, and didn’t own my body. I remember holding the mic stand as if it would keep me upright. When I sang the song in August, I had only just decided to officially end my marriage. I removed the mic from the stand, and let myself be pulled by the piano, the audience. The anguish was different. My voice had changed.

Yet, I was still me. Though I was not able to duet myself, like the man who recorded himself before and after testosterone could, whatever my voice was, whoever I was at eighteen was in there. I’ve been talking of “unraveling” one life as way to explain the changes of marriage to oneness. This is not a slash and burn or surgical operation, but a remaking: a new pattern or weave of myself, the threads still the same but some given greater prominence, others allowed to sink back.

Here’s a recording of the song I sang last week, though not recorded last week but in December. I probably sound different even now from this, and you’ll find errors in my singing, but I like it. Many thanks to my brother, actual brave professional musician John Gray Shermyen for backing, recording, and producing this for me at his home.

Edit: I found an old recording from high school singing a different song if you want to hear how my voice has changed/stayed the same more precisely. Shout out to high school band classmates for this recording from eleven years ago doing The Smiths “This Charming Man.”