🎧 Conversation With My Voice

If you could sit around a kitchen table and have tea with your Voice, like it was a person, what would you say? What could they tell you?

There’s no date on this photo but looking at the costume and the little tutu I’m wearing, it was probably taken in Camarillo, CA. I would be around 7 or 8. The photographer was awful! They’d get each of us in the company-requested pose, and then take FOREVER to take the picture. Our backs hurt and our faces from smiling, but nothing could repress the joy in my eyes.

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This piece is inspired by a writing assignment in my work with Elissa Weinzimmer of Voice Body Connection.

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Conversation With My Voice read by Demian

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Part I: What would I say if I could talk to my voice, to my body?

I would say “I’m sorry”, and “Would you like to try again?”

I would ask, “Will you walk this healing journey with me?”

I think I’m ready… to know you. I think I’m done running away, rejecting and denying… even resenting you.

Did I say I’m sorry?

I want to call a cease fire to the war I’ve raged on myself. I want to sign the peace treaty, no terms, no conditions, just a heartfelt apology and extended hand, to open the door to “What’s next?”

I’m ready to listen and be okay with wherever we are.

I want to know the stories carried in my body, to take care of it, of you, like I know you took care of the child I used to be.

Because I’m beginning to realize you did.

Because I’m beginning to realize that you ... my body… never betrayed me. I know who did, and I can take back what they never had a right to.  

I want an intimate relationship with you, my voice, my body.

I want to be walk toward achieving what makes me feel alive and to sit with you in anticipatory curiosity.

I want to trust, to not let the prospect of yielding, or giving in to that trust, fill me with terror.

I want to say yes to being here, whole and present, with you.

Part II: What would my voice say to me? What else does it want me to know?

I want you to know, I’m here, listening. Can you hear me, too?

I want to dance.

Remember that? What it felt like?

I want to be fluid and expressive. I want to twirl and leap across the living room and through your vocal folds.

I want to retrieve the ballerina in me and free her.

I want to reclaim what was taken, stolen from you. But your dad didn’t make you quit dance. He made you quit lessons.

But you were always the dancer.

He didn’t take that away, any more than he stopped you from ever singing again, like he threatened he would, when one performance was less than perfect.

We didn’t go anywhere.

Where did you go?

We’re here, dancing through your veins, through diaphragm and lungs. Vibrating through muscle and bone, leaping with grand jetés across ink onto paper, pirouetting around notes, bouncing back off walls, to ears and into your arms.

Catch me.

I’m here in every heartbeat, every sigh, every muffled sob in pillow. Yes, even there, I was dancing, rocking you calm, anchoring you, fortifying you note by note, brick by brick, building walls to protect you, to later climb over and dig under, calling you home like a lighthouse beam guiding you to your harbor.

I choreographed survival.

I now want to sing celebration.

And I want this dance with you. Not gymnastics, I don’t care about range. Just enough notes for us to tell a story, you and I, to evoke emotion.

My stage doesn’t have to be large. It just has to be spacious enough to hold a heart, and space enough to create together—song, words, movement—literally, in the body you have now.

We want to come home. Let us come home.

So Dear Friend,

What part of you wants to come home?

From my heart to yours,

Demian Elaine’ Yumei ~ Silent No More

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