Omega Point

Singing in the shower

For a long time, I was embar­rassed about the way my voice sounds. It’s still one of the things I have the most trou­ble with since the great “Hey, let’s grow 8 inches taller than every­one else in our class!” deba­cle of my teenage years.

It’s taken me a long time, but I’m finally feel­ing more com­fort­able with my body. I actu­ally own (and occa­sion­ally wear!) heels now. Take that, feet!

Now I’m start­ing to warm up to my voice as well. When I think about it, one of the biggest cat­a­lysts hap­pened sev­eral months ago. I ran­domly met a group of women vis­it­ing Van­cou­ver from Seat­tle — two cou­ples a decade or so older than me. We struck up a con­ver­sa­tion and, one of them men­tioned –with­out any fish­ing on my part– that she thought I had had a great voice. The other three chimed in, agree­ing that my voice was “hot” and did I sing? Oh, but I should! I’d sound great. One of them com­pared it to “Shane, you know, from the L Word?” This was met with agree­ment and much nodding.

What!? These are not sen­ti­ments I’ve often heard. Were they mess­ing with me? No, that didn’t seem likely, given the spon­tane­ity and appar­ent sin­cer­ity of their words. Sure, per­haps their com­par­i­son to Kather­ine Moen­nig as Shane was a bit of a stretch, but then again, I’ve always known that I was being just a tad inse­cure and self-deprecating by describ­ing my voice as sound­ing like Cap­tain Janeway as por­trayed by Bea Arthur.

Days later, after I’d given their words some thought, I real­ized that even if their opin­ion isn’t one that’s broadly agreed-upon, that’s not impor­tant. What is impor­tant is the source of the sen­ti­ment: a group of seem­ingly suc­cess­ful, socially-inclined gay women. Sure, in gen­eral terms, it’s nice being told you have an attrac­tive qual­ity, but I know that I’ve always been far more recep­tive to com­pli­ments from the cute girl hand­ing me my cof­fee than from some ran­dom dude as I step around him on the street.

So maybe it doesn’t mat­ter if every­one thinks my voice is hot, so long as it’s pos­si­ble that some­one does. We all seek val­i­da­tion from oth­ers, despite mostly real­iz­ing that it’s not par­tic­u­larly healthy and that we should feel good about our­selves with­out need­ing some­one else’s approval. Still, free com­pli­ments feel good, par­tic­u­larly when they come from some­one unex­pected. The fact that it came from sev­eral some­ones — sev­eral les­bian some­ones — made it all the more sat­is­fy­ing to hear.

So where does this new­found sense of not-total-loathing leave me now? I came away from the North­ern Voice 2007 con­fer­ence with an inter­est in video blog­ging. I’m beta test­ing Sec­ond Life’s upcom­ing voice chat sys­tem, and as I write this, I real­ize that I can’t remem­ber the last time I felt anx­i­ety about using the phone. Wow. Maybe just singing along to Dar and Ani isn’t such a far-fetched idea after all.

Some­times, pos­i­tive change hap­pens with­out us even being fully aware of it. I’d like to keep that up.

(Cross­posted from a com­ment on ChangeEverything.ca)