I Lost My Voice Before I Found It

The first time it happens, I’m standing on a stage. I’m ten minutes into a speech on “authenticity,” “power,” “finding your path”—the series of platitudes-with-a-twist I’ve become known for and am now invited to spout—when my voice cracks and I can no longer make the words in my brain come out as sounds from my mouth. It’s a momentary glitch in the system; a gurgling gasp, air pushing through tissue where language should be. The episode lasts seconds, but even then I know it is a signal, a “check engine” light. Something is wrong in my body and what is wrong feels serious.

It’s 2017, early summer. Trump is in office, which is bad, but we don’t know quite how bad yet. People are traveling, congregating, achieving. I’m at the height of my career. Earlier that year, I’d landed a high-power, high-profile job. Two months later, I published my first book—a career guide for misfits—which is well-received and positions me to become that thing everyone wants in 2017, a human brand.

Suddenly, people who never cared to talk to me want to talk to me. Suddenly, my unanswered emails go answered. Suddenly, the people looking over shoulders at parties are looking for me. I field interview requests, get made up for photoshoots, am whisked away to lunches and drinks. I spend chilly pre-dawn west coast mornings on the phone with east coast reporters who want to discuss my productivity secrets; what I’m reading, buying, and wearing; how to “get my life.” After, I shower, dress, and drive into the fancy Hollywood office where I spend the next nine to ten hours working my fancy Hollywood-adjacent job.

I’d started my professional life late. After years as a waitress and college dropout, I get my first office job when I’m nearly thirty. For the next decade, I slog my way up and through the ranks of print and digital publishing. I endure media recessions, closures, and layoffs, and I work strategically and relentlessly throughout. I understand the fickle, arbitrary nature of success, how difficult any degree of it is to achieve. I’d watched those around me perform, preen, and paw toward it; claw at and covet it. I’d pined for success too. And here it was. If conventional wisdom taught me anything, I knew that when success comes for you, you show up, no matter what shape you’re in. If you don’t, you face a lifetime of regret. If you don’t, it may never come again.

About mid-way through my book tour, the sides of my neck begin to ache. The pain is dull, but persistent and throbbing. It’s as if someone has a light clamp on my throat, or I am being strangled by the world’s slowest, most inefficient strangler. I wake up hoarse. By the end of recording a half hour podcast, I’m panting, each word an act of force. I’d always had one of those voices, low and raspy, straddling the line between Lauren Bacall-alluring and two-packs-a-day troubled trash. But this voice is different. There’s no reason to it. I’ll read half a paragraph aloud and it’ll all sound fine, then inhale and be met with spittle and wheeze. I know I should stop talking, but for weeks I don’t. Instead, I pitch, promote, and proselytize. People say I sound “sexy.” I banter, quip, and advise.

The throbbing continues. The sounds get weird. I start to worry. Insomnia Google suggests esophageal cancer, ALS, recovery from swallowing a fish bone. Maudlin at midnight, I play out my future: These are the last days of what I’ve known as human talking. Soon, I will have one of those weird voice machines. I’d better make my last words count. I work through the pain.

*

The vocal cords, or vocal folds as they are sometimes called, are a set of elastic mucous membranes located midway down the throat which stretch horizontally across the larynx.

Using air pushed up from the lungs, and with the help of muscles in the neck, vocal cords meet and vibrate when we speak or sing, which is how they produce sound. The tighter your vocal cords, the higher-pitched these sounds will be; the looser, the lower-pitched. Healthy vocal cords are small, just a few centimeters in length, smooth, and, due to scant blood circulation, white.

Though this area of the body is often referred to as the voice box, it’s really more of a portal, connecting multiple physical functions (such as breathing, swallowing, speaking). And for such an important system, it’s lousy with problems—surprisingly delicate and easily injured. Vocal cords can be damaged by everything from bad habits and everyday irritants—including smoking, air pollution, and consuming alcohol—to minor health conditions like acid reflux and respiratory allergies.

Voice quality can be negatively impacted by poor posture, whispering, and forceful coughing, and degraded if the vocal cords become too dry, or if you yell at a painful pitch once or talk for a sustained time at a high volume, say, at a concert or into someone’s ear at a crowded bar.

When they are irritated or misused, the vocal folds can swell, chafe, and develop nodules (basically calluses of the throat), polyps (more like blisters), or tumors (both benign and cancerous), many of which require surgery to remove. Left untreated, these lesions can hemorrhage when we speak or sing, and—in extreme cases—lead to permanent vocal cord paralysis.

Overuse hurts vocal cords, but they can be harmed by underuse too, becoming weaker and smaller and, eventually, atrophying if you don’t speak enough (a condition you hear most frequently in the shaky voices of the elderly, who tend to talk less than the rest of us).

If you research the mercurial nature of the voice long enough, you will find it surprising that any of us can ever speak at all.

Like so much in life, it works effortlessly until, one day, it doesn’t.

Like so much in life, it works effortlessly until, one day, it doesn’t.

*

Worse things have happened, but here’s what happened to me: Before I was old enough to voice an idea of who I was, one was voiced for me. I was a brat, a liar, a bitch, a sneak, bad. My teen parents—too young, too hurt, ill-prepared for the task at hand—punched and pinched and pulled my body more times than my brain has memory for, more times than I can count. No family story is tidy. I was loved and sheltered and fed. My working-class parents bought crayons and Barbies, built bikes and desks. They washed and folded the clothes. Like every parent, every human, they were inconsistent and imperfect. As the therapy trope goes, they did the best they could with the (limited) tools they had.

Still, speaking up in a house of chaos is a summoning. Contradict, and you could be slapped across the face. Fight back, and you might be kicked down stairs. Crack wise, and you’ll receive a black eye dark enough that you’re kept out of school for a week. I was an inconvenient child, emotionally incontinent, mouthy, full of feelings no one knew how to place. I didn’t know what was good for me. I pushed my luck. Abandoning my voice became a matter of accretion. Eventually, when told so enough, one learns to shut the fuck up.

One night, when I am no longer a tween and not yet a legal adult, I drink too much at a party and discover my body behind a strange door in a strange bedroom under the strange form of a boy I did not like and did not want. I don’t remember saying yes. I don’t remember saying anything at all. But I do remember his hot breath on my cheek and in my ear, the weight of his lacrosse-trained arms, his bare, fleshy belly, round and heavy with beer.

I don’t know how it ended, or what I did when it was over, or how I got home. But at school on Monday, everyone knows what happened because the boy—who is loud and ugly and vile—tells them. When I try to explain, I don’t have the right words, and even my friends don’t believe me. Eventually, I stop explaining, stop contradicting, stop saying anything about it at all. For the rest of the year, another boy—the cute boy, the sweet boy, the one I’d gone to the party to see—no longer looks at me. For the remainder of high school (college, beyond), there will be many more nights with many more drinks and many more boys. I give my body away wordlessly and without joy. I become a girl I never wanted to be.

Psychologists say children who endure abuse search for faults in their own behavior to rationalize what’s happened to them. Self-blame serves as a kind of protection, providing the child with a sense of safety and control. If they are bad, the thinking goes, then they brought the pain upon themselves. If they brought it upon themselves, then they alone have the power to fix it. Being “bad” becomes foundational to the child’s identity, a quality mitigated only by overcompensating with what we think of as “good.”

Carrying this pathology beyond childhood, abused children often transform into perfectionistic, high-achieving adults. Professional success—and its accompanying accolades and external validation—becomes a compulsion, a balm, a space to hide within. It telegraphs to the world how they are now good.

*

When I finally make my way into Beverly Hills office of voice specialist Dr. Anca Barbu, I’m three months into the vocal glitching.

“If there’s anything really wrong, you’ll be in good hands,” explains the primary care doctor who suggests I’m just “stressed” but allows a referral anyway, passing over a sheet from his prescription pad scrawled with her name. “She trained in Boston,” he adds, then whispers, “with the doctor who worked on Adele.”

Dr. Barbu is not interested in an extended patient intake. We’re not here to gab (the gabbing being the problem, after all). Instead, she instructs me to hop up on a red leather stool so my face is eye level with hers, a position so close and so intimate, that under different circumstances, we might kiss. She wraps a paper bib around my neck, hands over a paper napkin, and tells me to stick out my tongue as she places the cord of a long, thin camera down my throat.

With my tongue held and the camera descending, she directs me to make the sound “EEEEEEEE,” clearly and without gagging, a task more awkward and humiliating than I initially understand.

“EEEEEE—” Cough cough gag spit.

“I can’t get a clear picture unless you stay calm. Let’s try again.”

“EEEEEE—” Choke choke drool gag.

“OK, close your eyes this time and think of something soothing.”

“EEEEEEEE . . . ”

As she examines, Dr. Barbu documents what she sees. When we’re finished with the tongue/camera exercise, she flips the monitor around and reveals what she’s found.

“See here, there are at least two polyps, which means your vocal cords can’t meet, which is why you’re struggling to talk,” she explains. She suggests the cause is likely a combination of factors, but mainly reckless overuse (she compares the amount of speaking I’m doing to a novice runner entering a marathon). The images of my vocal cords resemble blown-up female genitalia; the polyps are reddish purple and bulbous, like a particularly angry STD.

“My opinion is you need surgery,” she says flatly, outlining the risks in case I oppose: The polyps will get bigger, they could burst, they could bleed; they’ll build up scar tissue, paralyze the vocal cords, my voice could never be OK again or the same.

“The earliest surgery appointment I have is in six weeks.”

Until then, she’d like me to go on complete voice rest (i.e., not uttering a word). But if that’s not realistic, I’m to limit any speaking to fewer than three hours per day, in quiet rooms, at low volume. Post-surgery, I should prepare to remain completely silent for two weeks, and restrict talking for a few months after that.

“This is a good thing,” she says, smiling, wrapping up. She expects I’ll heal completely within the year.

On the way out, I begin to simultaneously sweat and cry. The diagnosis is better than I expected, the suggested treatment such a small, short sacrifice in a long, privileged life. But my brain is broken, so all I think is: How the hell am I supposed to stop talking and keep working. I’m fucked.

I head back to the office. I’ve been gone for two hours, so there are approximately 4,672 new Slack messages awaiting my response. I cancel an appearance at a handbag store pop-up where I’m scheduled to speak on a subject I no longer recall—perhaps “owning it”? I send another email canceling my participation in a panel discussion on something like “making it” that’s set to include me, an Instagram poet, the female founder of a fitness phenomenon, and another Lady In Business, I’m not sure who. I receive swift replies. Both organizers are pissed.

All I think is: How the hell am I supposed to stop talking and keep working. I’m fucked.

In the next few weeks, the high-profile project I’ve been hired to launch is launching, so I check in with my bosses daily, run multiple planning meetings, chat up worried members of my team. I have coffee with writers and realize the ambient noise is too loud for me to talk over, but I talk over it, anyway. I work nights. I head into the office on weekends.

“What’s the point of stopping now,” I whisper to my husband, who is concerned. My voice becomes ghost-like, a strange haunting crackle. In a followup appointment, I “EEEEE” again and the Boston-trained, Adele-adjacent surgeon shows me another screen reflecting my inflamed esophagus, the lumps angrier, veiny as an alcoholic’s nose.

“You’ve been talking, I see. The polyps are now bleeding. You need to talk less.”

Careers are a matter of choice as much as a matter of chance. Long before hustle culture entered the social media zeitgeist, long before social media itself, I was a seven-day-a-week worker. I’d made myself indispensable at every company I ever worked for, in every position I’d ever held. At the expense of nearly everything else in my life, I was always—always—good at my job. Work was a duty, a beacon, a source of comfort and survival, a welcome distraction from the mess of being alive. My voice was an instrument to convince people to hire and retain and promote me, to let me rally others and lead. It also allowed me to create and perform an identity, to hide from the world how awful I felt inside, how chronically unsafe and ashamed.

What does it mean to have value? What determines success? How do we know if we’ve failed? In the weeks leading up to surgery, I can’t really talk, so I’m forced to observe. I listen in on chaotic who-just-joined conference calls and become acutely attuned to the name-dropping, the undermining, an overwhelming sense of callousness and disregard. I sit down with self-important experts spouting impressive-sounding word scrambles that upon closer inspection don’t actually make much sense. In staff meetings, I smile obligingly at flaccid boss jokes and watch others do the same; nod along to unfocussed plans and proposals that have little hope of coming true; bear witness to inter-employee squabbles, favor-currying, position-jockeying, unnecessary cruelties from HR.

I begin to realize what I have is not simply a surface problem, but more a revolution from within. Turns out, my brain is as exhausted as my voice. I let an all-caps Slack tirade from a C in the C-suite go unanswered for hours longer than I should. I stop racing to coddle and capitulate. I don’t have the vocal strength to cajole. What I’m feeling is new, and I’m afraid to give words to it. Though I don’t know it yet, something is cracking inside me, an understanding of myself I’d carried my entire life. I am headed toward a beginning and an end.

Once the date of surgery is locked, I ask my boss if they’d prefer I come into the office during the two-week voice rest period or complete my work from home.

“Make sure your department is covered, but stay home,” they reply. “I don’t want a weird mute walking around.”

*

Microlaryngeal surgery is a minimally invasive procedure that’s used to biopsy or remove abnormal growths from the throat.

It’s performed commonly on professional singers—Björk, Elton John, Celine Dion, Steven Tyler, Meghan Trainor, Lionel Richie and, yes, Adele have all had it—and also people whose work requires they talk a lot, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was on post-surgery voice rest when Donald Trump announced that plozma could save us from Covid-19. Sadly, in 1997, Julie Andrews’s surgery permanently damaged her vocal cords, but technological advances have made the procedure less risky since, with better, more accurate results.

On the day of surgery, before general anesthesia, I’m a shaky, anxious mess. A nurse pats my leg and covers me in an extra blanket. “You watch too many doctor shows,” she says. “You’ll be fine.”

She’s right. The surgery goes off without a hitch. Dr. Barbu finds and removes five polyps from the space where she initially thought there were two. I wake up groggy and sore, but relieved.

I spend the next two weeks silently, peacefully working from home. It’s October and there’s a slight chill in the Los Angeles air. In the afternoons, I go to the grocery store. I pick my daughter up early from school. I make dinner. I wipe down the countertops. I feed the cats. I sit close with my husband and watch bad, and good, TV. I research local psychotherapists. It’s time. I become less concerned with earning a living than I am with earning my life.

I become less concerned with earning a living than I am with earning my life.

In our followup appointment, I speak to Dr. Barbu using my new voice for the first time. It’s firmer, lighter, different. I notice there’s a bit of a lilt. Comparing the before and after pictures, my vocal cords now appear out-of-box fresh and smooth, a clean start. I ask about recurrence. But she assures me it’s unlikely to happen.

“You understand your voice better now,” she says, “and you know how to protect it.” I thank her, getting a bit teary. To both of our surprise, we hug.

When I return to work the next day, it’s the same stress theater, each character hitting their marks. I’ll work there for six months more, but I’ll never really be there, or anywhere, in the same way again. It’s a game I know how to play, but I no longer care to. I don’t need to win it to be good.

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