June 30, 2015
Day three. Or... day six? Day 37? Whatever.
Though I have not spoken much today with the exception of walking my dog and asking him to please not poop on the neighbor's garden (which he rejected and did anyway), I believe I feel a bit better.
For those of you that do not know me, I am kind of a - what you might say - "fake" opera singer. I do love it and whole heartedly appreciate it. It's just really not my calling, no matter how hard I wanted it to be. I stopped pursuing the competitions/auditions/performances lifestyle about a year and a half ago while congruently recovering from my first diagnosis of nodules - October, 2013. I had just started graduate school at USC - in Vocal Arts mind you - and low and behold, was one month later facing the embarrassment of this unfamiliar "disease."
At that time, I did not tell a soul. Okay, maybe a couple of souls. But few and far between. Not even my parents knew, nor my directors, nor my (god-forbid) school colleagues. I was absolutely mortified.
"Over singing," my ENT said. "You need to drop something, Allie."
"But I can't. I just started grad school. And I have to do the opera. And all of these summer program auditions. And I need to make money teaching. And..."
"Drop something."
So after six months of playing the balancing act game, I finally recovered and was in the best vocal shape of my life. I learned so much from that experience. Simultaneously (and certainly not coincidentally), I decided to pursue MY calling -- popular and contemporary music. I became invested in coordinating vocal techniques within classical and popular genres, realizing that many are one and the same. And low and behold, the pressures of competing, singing that damn high C at the end of Donizetti's arias, and waiting to find out if MY "distinct" soprano voice might be the exception to the sopranos-never-make-summer-programs rule, just slipped away. And with that, my voice returned.
I spent a lot of my initial recovery time that year pondering the connection between the pressures of a classical singer and vocal health issues. I wanted quantitative results: exactly how much DOES stress affect our larynx? So much that we create a physical attribute that finds its home in our vocal folds?
How common are vocal health issues in singers?
Obviously I cannot exactly get the quantitative results I want. But it does bring up the question of stress, anxiety, and pressure on singers correlating to our vocal health. We all know, as singers, how the emotional and physiological aspects of our body are indefinitely intertwined. If this is so, then I beg the final question...
Athletes have injuries. Constantly. But you never hear people say "wow - what an idiot. He's a horrible baseball pitcher for breaking his arm like that."
Singers are athletes. And injuries happen. I spent so much time hiding behind my fear of expressing "nodule-vulnerability" that I psychologically convinced myself of being a "faulty singer." Well shit - no wonder it took me so long to recover if half the recovery was rebuilding my self-efficacy!
How can we overcome this? Will we learn to nurture and support one another through difficult, emotionally draining, physically frustrating times?
So many questions.
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