Cover Photo: photo via Adam Foster/flickr
photo via Adam Foster/flickr

Losing My Voice and Finding It

In the quiet forced upon me, I started to hear the voices of other selves.

The intake form at the Beth Israel ENT is long, with a long list of statements you’re meant to react to on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being “I don’t experience that at all” and 5 being “I experience that almost always.” Many of them are medical in nature (“I experience pain in my throat”; “I have trouble swallowing”), but as you go through the list, the questions become rather existential. “My issues with my voice make me feel like I’m not myself.” “My inability to sing makes me sad or depressed.”

didwas

did

pursue

It was only when that identity met with an inexorable obstacle, the strain and sometimes-loss of my voice, that I was forced to question that story I had written for myself.

photo via Andreas Hein/flickr

Mortified

The Libertine

I want to take risks, I want to really be happy and love something. My current whim that has chosen to strike my fancy tonight is that I want to write. Because my own talent, the thing I do better than anyone else, I think, or I’d like to think, is understand why people think and feel the way they do. And I always want writers to reflect something that is human and real and maybe I can do that.

Rachel Klein is a writer, performer, and teacher living in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Reductress, and The Toast. You can follow her on twitter @racheleklein.