If You Give a Mouse a Substack...
and take away her voice, she's gonna write a rambling update that may or may not be of use to anyone.
Perhaps ironically for someone who writes a newsletter recently renamed "no talk too big," I lost my voice ten days ago. I’m still looking for it (increasingly desperately).
It seemed like just another daycare cold, making us all miserable and exhausted over the weekend but (hopefully) destined to improve relatively quickly. But by day two I knew I'd struck it unlucky this time: as happens sometimes with an upper respiratory virus, my asthma had been majorly triggered, and my breathing became so labored that I couldn't even climb out single flight of stairs without panting for 30 minutes afterward. Guess who hates having a mama who can't (or, from his perspective, won't) play your favorite new game, where "the blue guy" (Sonic) gets chased around the house ENDLESSLY by "the red guy" (Knuckles)? Yeah, my kid had a lot of meltdowns that weekend. I went to urgent care the following Monday; they listened to my lungs, which they said “sounded good,” and sent me off with a prescription to ride it out. Gotta love a virus.
Of course, the real prescription was rest, which is unrealistic for me at the best of times and was impossible that week. I had a sick kiddo and husband who needed me to be at least semi-functional, plus a full-time job that included an onsite photo shoot, weeks in the making, planned for Tuesday. So I dragged my coughing carcass in for the shoot (the photos were of food, luckily, not of me, but they entailed a lot of setup and management and moving around and talking), and the next morning when I woke up my voice was gone. My body, pushed beyond its limits, had basically said “fuck your free will.” Fair enough.
One of the things my mom said to me growing up that I quote most often is ‘slow is fast.’ If we don't give ourselves time to do things properly, we’ll end up re-doing them, whether that’s recovering from illness or injury (her most frequent use of the phrase with my impatient ass) or doing a complicated task (DIYers like to say ‘measure twice, cut once’). And when it comes to our bodies, they’ll force us to rest if they have to. An injury will worsen if we push it; a virus will last longer if we don’t rest. Our voice will disappear if we insist on using it even though it hurts.
But the reality is that even our bodies can’t always force the issue. Or, I guess, sometimes we’re (I’m) too stubborn to listen, even when the issue is forced. Last weekend was my son’s third birthday — my parents were in town, my brother- and sister-in-law were staying with us, and we had our kiddo’s first ever peer birthday party planned for Sunday. I had shit to do, and no matter how shit I felt I was determined to do it.
But, of course, every time I pushed myself I could feel my body pushing back, warning me that I wouldn’t get better until I actually rested. And like the stubborn idiot that I am, I ignored those warnings: when I got my voice back (partly) on Sunday morning, I spent my son’s birthday party getting to know the other parents, and by the time we were calling out our goodbyes I was back to waving and gesturing apologetically at my throat.
Four days later, I still haven’t regained my voice, even partially. I’m forced to whisper, which is apparently likely to make the problem worse, so every hour of every day is a constant cost/benefit analysis, placing each thought on the scales to see if it's really worth the extension of laryngitis that will likely result from expressing it.
Meanwhile, the world goes on. My phone rings, work calls sent to voicemail, messages to be returned only promptly if someone leaves an email address, medical appointments delayed and un-reschedulable until I can speak again. The Zoom meetings I’m supposed to be having with a consultant about a very important thing I’ll tell you about later have been indefinitely delayed, as my paid time with said consultant ticks down. At drop-off, my son’s daycare classmates peer curiously at my mask, repeating their questions at a higher volume as if that’ll enable me to respond audibly (at least they’ve stopped bringing me books to read). And my son has started asking me to ‘whisper’ books to him — which I do, despite the cost, because reading to him is one of my favorite activities.
Navigating the world without my voice has made me painfully aware of how hard it must be for people who can’t speak — or, as my friend Rachel Zemach, author of the beautiful memoir The Butterfly Cage, often writes about, how heavily biased the world is toward hearing and speaking people (and, of course, all the other types of ‘able’ we assume people will fit into without bothering to accommodate any deviation). I’ve been reading Rachel’s work for years and I understood what she was saying on an intellectual level, but it took me living without access to my voice to really feel the frustration and helplessness that our inaccessible society can cause.
I’m not going to write a whole second essay here, because I’ve already rambled for too many paragraphs (see what happens when I can’t communicate verbally??) and something like this should really be discussed more thoughtfully, with research and first-person expertise from others, rather than a stream of consciousness opinion-dump from someone who’s experiencing a small sliver of this, temporarily (I hope!). But I couldn’t not mention it. If nothing else, I think it’s always worth mentioning the times that our understanding of someone else’s experience deepens, if only in the hope that others will begin to take note of and share those moments in themselves as well.
And now that I’ve taken this newsletter on a wild ride from hyper-personal to macro-societal (a ride that accurately reflects the state of both my tangled, virus-fogged mind and the world, I suppose), I’ll sign off. I have lots of more focused posts planned for the near future, including one where I tell you what that really important thing is that I’m already falling behind on, so keep your eyes peeled. And if you have any sway with the god of vocal cords, put in a good word for me (or send me his email, so I can ‘speak’ on my own behalf).
Damn that woman can write!