Purely Obsessing Over My Voice

Music has always been my greatest refuge. When my grandma died, I let myself get swallowed by the trio of mariachis at the cemetery belting “Amor Eterno,” and in the silence of my home, Frances’ “Don’t Worry About Me.” As a child, when my parents would argue, I’d blare the harmonies of N*SYNC’s “This I Promise You,” drowning out their marital issues and wondering if I would have a love as great as they promised. Not only would I listen, I would sing.

I stole a microphone from my dad’s antique DJ set that he used in the 80s, imagining myself as one of the world’s greatest singers. Because my parents didn’t have a lot of money, I sought out opportunities at school from the time I was eight to eighteen. Wherever there was music, you could find me singing.

But lately, music is my greatest enemy. And not for the reasons you might think. Artistic anxiety, imposter syndrome—sure. Those common, nagging fears have their roles in my occasional mental breakdowns. Except, and as recently as 2022, OCD became my Ursula, stealing my voice, using it for its own gain.

Mo, my ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) therapist, listens as we discuss one of my newest exposures—posting videos of me singing on my Instagram page.

What’s the worst that could happen? they shrug.

Everything. People will hate me, my voice. They’ll think I don’t know anything about music at all, even though it’s the subject of all my writing.

That’s only the beginning of the intrusive thoughts.

When did I get here? According to my therapy app, I’m an OCD Conqueror! I thought I was close to being healed, to opting out of these Monday sessions and going to talk therapy like everyone else. Just last week, I told Mo that OCD was my passenger princess, and no longer in the driver’s seat. I own my car, I own my destiny.

Except, we all know the passenger princess gets to make the playlist, not the driver. OCD won’t play early 2000s pop punk hits. It’s going to play all of my worst fears concerning my artistry on repeat.

OCD sits in the passenger seat, glaring out the window, arms crossed. Paramore’s “Crave,” plays in the background. I sing over the music, attempting to mimic Hayley William’s vocal placement. I’ve been studying with a vocal coach for two years now, after ten years of not singing in front of anyone. I released two albums since, have songwriter friends. I’m in my musical adolescent phase, but working through the growing pains of wanting to expand my range and chord knowledge. My voice is bigger than ever before, and maybe a little tired, what with all the teaching I do…

Suddenly, the music abruptly ends and the whining of the road beneath my tires replaces the once soothing guitar. My voice, however, carries into the air, acapella.

"Craaaaave….”

OCD smirks. “Do you think you hit that note right? Try again.”

“It felt fine.” I clear my throat.

It looks from me back to the window with a shrug. “Okay, but tell me how your throat feels in thirty seconds. I’m telling you, if you don’t place those notes in the right place, or attempt it over and over again, there are consequences.”

Ten seconds in, I can feel it. Pain in my voice box. This is only sensorimotor OCD, I try to reassure myself, the real me. But the pain is too overwhelming. I swallow, too tough. “What did you do?”

“Oh, I didn’t do anything. You sang the note wrong. If you keep singing wrong, what do you think will happen?”

I’m at a loss for words. The red light washes over us as I crawl to a stop.

“Exactly. If you don’t preserve your voice, it’ll be gone forever. You’re probably already developing nodules. You know that your chords can also hemorrhage? You’re clearly on the path to snapping one like a piece of stale licorice.”

I cover my ears, but OCD is no stranger to attacking that part of my body either. “Check your right ear. Kind of muffled. You’re losing your hearing, too. All those shows in your twenties without proper ear protection. Right, you thought it was going to get lodged in your ear. Ha! Maybe that’s why you can’t hear pitch anymore. Thankfully, you know sign language!”

Stop it. Stop it.

Car horns blare behind me. My car lurches forward with a clumsy misstep of the gas. I turn the radio on again, trying to self soothe as I have done after countless losses, natural disasters, and heartbreak.

Hayley lets out an ethereal scream before the culmination of the bridge. I try to launch my note into the chorus, but my voice is not inside my throat anymore. It’s hiding somewhere inside of me, shivering.

I start the song over. Sing from the beginning. Each time that word “crave” comes up, my mouth runs dry, my shoulders rocks and tongue like dust.

OCD turns off the radio for good. “Do you remember last month at that Give a Fuck LA Benefit and Auction for LA Wildfire Relief when Hayley asked if everyone would sing along with her to Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love?’ and you sang so loud that the man in front of you glared…”

“And then Hayley said to ‘be confident with it’” I grin, remembering that I was the only loud one in my section. Hayley had to have been speaking to me.

“Are you sure she said that? Are you sure she wasn’t telling you to shut up?”

A lump in my throat rises and quiet tears run down my face. The pain is too immense and I try my best to swallow down the hurt. We ride in silence.

“I’m only doing this to protect you and the thing you love the most.”

I park behind the building of Music Academy where Annie, my vocal coach, is probably eagerly waiting for my progress on “Defying Gravity.” Except, in recent days, I haven’t trusted myself to nurture my own instrument, so if I’m not teaching, I’m not doing much more with my voice. In our last session, Annie interrogated where my voice went. It didn’t help that two weeks before she said that my voice sounded like “someone who is recovering from a cold.”

How could I have lost my voice?

OCD passes my phone to me. “Premenstrual dysphonia. This happened last year around your period. Remember that video where you were having trouble holding pitch?”

The little asshole wasn’t wrong about that. Maybe. I’m not so sure anymore. My body rarely feels like it belongs to me these days. Every sensation, swallowing, breathing—I am not running the show. Never did I think that OCD could manifest this way. Not even after experiences in childhood where I would force myself to blink, fearing my body had forgotten. Not even when my mom watched me try to pop my ears every couple of minutes on a FaceTime call, or when my friends would watch me tug or cover one ear and then the other, checking for signs of garbled sounds. It makes me wonder if those trips to the ENT ten years ago were pointless. A laryngoscope and video laryngeal stroboscopy (VLS) revealed swollen vocal chords, redness, GERD. But did my mind manifest that for me?

OCD drops me off at vocal lessons like a helicopter parent with bad intentions.

Hazel, the Music Academy’s receptionist, greets me with: “Annie has the flu…”

OCD bolts into the lobby with hand sanitizer and saline nose spray. “Oh, you know if you get the flu, your voice is surely going to get wiped out. Remember when you had pneumonia…”

“Anyway. You’ll be working with Tegan today,” Hazel smiles.

A new coach. All of my hairs stand on end. “Cool.”

“I think this is good for you,” Hazel says. “Get you new exposure to working with different people.”

And in the front room, greeting other students and their parents. Perfect. “Totally what I need…”

“Well,” I look over at OCD. It waves from me from a chair in the lobby.

Mo would agree, and maybe that inner me, that voice hiding somewhere, knows it, too.

Tegan and I go through a sixty-second introduction of what Annie and I have been working on. When I mentioned “Defying Gravity,” their eyes bulge from behind their oversized glasses. They remark that it’s a “big song,” and it is.

Maybe too big for me and my shrinking voice.

“We’re going to do some theatre kid shit today,” Tegan says.

I peer through the oversized window in our studio, and there is OCD waiting, waving hand sanitizer and other protective substances in my direction. It’s trying to let me know it’s there for me, because singing is hard. It’s vulnerable. It’s the most authentic thing humans have, so distinct and raw.

Tegan walks over to me as I fumble through rudimentary lip trills. She observes as I go through a series of tongue tension release exercises “nyah” and “yahs.” The further up I go up in the octave, OCD becomes more nervous. It runs past the window once I move to a G5 and puts its hand the door knob. Tegan must hear it too, because they hover their hands above my head.

“We’re putting this aside for the day,” they say and pluck my imaginary brain and stick it in the corner.

The jiggling door handle comes to a halt. OCD is grounded, and so am I. There is no real pain in my throat. Tegan explains that I am doing all the right things. There’s a lot of resonance, I am on pitch. My instincts to harmonize all reveal I am who I think I am: a singer.

“So what do you want to try to sing today?” Tegan asks.

I am craving only one song. She puts it on, and together, we go through what the placement of what each vowel might look like. When I go for that higher note, Tegan reminds me that the sound should leave my thick skull. That my brain has no power over it.

I let go. The sound escapes and I am covered in goosebumps. OCD isn’t even in the room anymore. It’s not in the lobby. For thirty minutes, at least, it’s left the building.

When I return to the parking lot, OCD is sobbing in the backseat, and for once I ignore it. I don’t try to reassure it, either. I drive, singing the entire way home, my voice no longer shaking in the shadows.

I can’t wait, I sing together with Hayley. To do it all again.

A warmth emerges from my core breaking through Ursula’s curse. Sparkling amber spreads into my vocal folds buzzing through my nose and my lips. It appears even singing can get me through anything, including my own thoughts and the fear of the unknown.

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