But what of that?

For the longest time, I thought I would be a musician. I mean, of course, a professional musician. I spent years in college studying vocal performance, mastering music theory and vocal technique, avoiding the cat fights that broke out between sopranos and trying to socially insert myself with the percussionists, the composition majors, anyone who wouldn’t sweetly shit talk me to my face for no other reason than sharing the same repertoire.

Eventually, the emotional toll exacted became too much for me; I love, and love, singing in a way I have never loved anything else, but the constant defense of my voice and my musicianship stripped the beauty from it all. I dropped my music major and switched over to religious studies, where I had a minor already. The rest, they say, is history.

Since then, my half-trained voice has mostly been put to use at karaoke bars, where I sing Patsy Cline, Pat Benetar, any music that originates in genuine talent but isn’t so intense that my prentension might be noted. I don’t know for certain that you could find Handel on a karaoke list, but even if it was there, I wouldn’t put it on my slip. I even shy away from anything to intense from the musical theater genre. I don’t want to be a show off, which is probably the reason I was an outcast as a vocal performance major as well.

But a voice is what I have. I wish I could tell you what I sound like when I sing, but I don’t know. The sound is pleasing to me as it flows through the bones and sinews in my face and throat, but given what people tell me, I’m afraid the sound I hear isn’t anything like the one that ricochets through the air to someone else’s ears. This was always a challenge when I was a singer, because I didn’t have an understanding of my volume, my color, my timbre, or my range. I had to learn how to sing by feel, which is still what I do. I can read music, but it is a concept I can’t explain. I see a “C” and know that it vibrates in a certain way. A “C” feels a certain way, an A another, E is even different. My favorite notes to sing are C-D-E, it is a musical spot that feels liberatory and existential to me. My pitch I feel in my chest, my volume in my face, the color is at the roof of my mouth. All of this is logically governed by the laws of aural physics, acoustics. 

I enjoy it when people praise my singing, when they say things like ‘you made me cry’, ‘you sound like an angel.’ But that is not why I sing. Music, the kind I make, is something that escapes my grasp of understanding. I don’t know why the way I feel when I’m sitting on the middle pitch between two other voices is suspensory in its beauty, why it erases every other feeling. It is not that I am thinking of what I should be doing with my voice – when I sing my best, it is effortless, hazy, unfocused, flowing. It pours out of me from a place that I didn’t know was even there.

Singing is why I believe in God. What comes from me when I sing isn’t mine, its poured through me.

Lately, I have been singing again. I joined the Denver Women’s Chorus last fall, and was met by a community of awkward women who loved music. It was wonderful to be confronted with the mystery of music again, to be pushed and prodded and find the tiny niche where I fit. I’ve been singing at church too, soaring voice in the half abandoned sanctuary where we meet. I wonder, in these moments, what would have happened if I could have ridden out the awful social pain of being a music major. Could I have done this for a living – by which I mean, could I have found work, and could I have loved it? I still don’t know.