What I love the most about singing is the sensation of silk between my vocal folds. Like gold or silver; like water, like sand, like glass; gliding softly. That’s what I love the most.

I love that the vibrations, which are my voice, are playing on the inside of my throat, causing sounds that are uniquely mine. Oh, and I love knowing that the sound I hear in my head is, in fact, only mine, not heard by anyone else. My own secret. And the voice that others hear is a secret to me. My voice is both me and The Other at the same time. It’s very philosophical and a little bit confusing. Intriguing! Exciting! I love it.

I love that my own body, my own breathing, is turning words like cricoid, thyroid, cartilage, pharynx, glottis, hyoid, into poetry.

I love that I, through slow and meticulous practice, have become an athlete, like someone you might find in a circus, but with my voice. Soaring and balancing on the melodies and intervals like a trapeze artist. 

Or maybe it’s dancing? Yes, singing is like dancing; I am dancing with my voice. Moving, stretching and bending, the cartilages, tendons, muscles and tissues, all the way down to my toes. My voice is everywhere in me, and I love it. 

I adore it. 

I crave it! 

I want to eat it!!

But, singing is also screaming, flirting, praying, contemplating, nursing, hating, seducing, eating, groaning, sighing, crying, laughing, loving, having tea, traveling, walking down the street, being in the rain, getting mad, getting madder, dying, dying again, being born again (Alleluia!). Singing is allowing someone who was born and died more than a thousand years ago to be forever young. It’s embodying their happiness, fears, sadness, frustration, anger, love, death, hunger, and desire;  letting them sing to us, with us, who live now. I love imagining their lives in each and every note on the paper, and making us one, magically, with my voice. Now they sing through me, like I am a medium. Am I divine? Of course – I am a singer. Singers are goddesses, at the very least.

I love it when my voice vibrates together with someone else’s voice (or instrument), here and now, and how exposed, naked and vulnerable we are in that meeting. Either the overtones blossom into rainbows with eternal possibilities, or it becomes dull like grey asphalt. We can’t hide from that truth – either it works (Alleluia!) or not. By all means, grey asphalt can be useful enough (who knows where the road leads?). But, mostly, luckily, it becomes a prism of voices and sounds. How can I not love that?

Singing is my truest voice. 

I can’t hide from it.

I can’t be silent or silenced. 

That is what I love the most.