Voice and skin
I have new scars.
My roomie’s pitbull bit me in the face my second day back in Oaxaca. Welcome home. She left my nose. Just a warning. Add those scars to the noise: scars like rosetta-stone-tattoos of my story, faded white against an increasingly complex pattern of Jackson Pollock freckles; surely if I look close enough I can see through it all to the skin. We’re waiting for all the puppies to be weened so the pit can go back and live with Shai’s parent’s in the mountains. In the meantime, I tiptoe around the house while it growls at me inexplicably. It’s disconcerting to have an animal hate you, especially when you spent your entire life around animals, even spending hours as a kid convincing strays and wild animals to trust you. And now, every time I look in the mirror, I have to remember this dog. Naively I assumed we had an agreement, the kind you have with animals, where I knew her territory, and she knew mine: divided up the house in imaginary lines. I even had a traditional Oaxacan energy clearing over this dog four months ago: smoke, herbs, egg. Clearly, she didn’t get the memo. Or she needed the clearing, not me.
Perception. The dog of me. Me of me. You of me. Me of you. We can never really know how we are perceived (humans perhaps more opague than dogs.) And yet, no matter how inaccurate what is imagined, my self-identity is tied up in your perception. “I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.” –Charles Horton Cooley. What else is Instagram for, other than me having control over your perception of me. But do you see that scar from chicken pox as a kid, that scar from splitting my chin on the stairs, do you know why I have a crooked nose? I know one side of my face looks happy and the other angry… but do you? Do I just remind you of your sister? Or do you see me?
Sometimes people surprise; they notice I’m worried before I do, or call out a pattern in the way I use words. One guy, one very weird guy at a bus stop saw the sides of my face. Someone else found the perfect constellation Orion in freckles on my arm. It sits in a spot I never see. They see us in a way we can never see ourselves: the map of our own typography, the sound of our voices, the attitude in our own faces, how approachable, how intimidating, how attractive, how proud, how present?
Even those things at the very surface of our oceans are full of associations I can barely begin to pick apart in this lifetime. I’m white. I’m short. I’m female. And I’m slowly growing into my grandmother’s skin. (At least I have this of hers. She was the only woman in the entire extended family on both sides with the fire to talk back to my dad. So for most of my life she’s the only one I respected. I do my best to turn into her… to use the code, the patterns that are her, that might live inside me. Our lives are so different, but we are much the same. Elizabeth, I’ll do my best. I miss you. I miss you and all your sun spots.)
The air around us precedes us, with our energy, with our voice. They say the magnetic field of your heart can be measured three feet away from the body, and I’ve met people who not only feel it, but see it, manipulate it. There’s something eerie about being perceived by someone who can see things you can’t see. “Your heart chakra is blocked,” they would always tell me. So I spent an entire day healing it: singing and feeling the sound. When I talk, do you hear the creative director? Do you hear the little girl: the pitch that rises fast when I’m excited, jumping in to tell a story? I was fearless with my voice as a kid, singing solo in plays, speaking up to answer questions first, giving concerts from the fireplace mantel, competitive speech and debate, dramatic interpretation… Then I found out that when you work in tech a feminine pitch is a hurdle and I learned it away. And now I have to learn it back: learning how to sound like myself, and to like the sound. Vocal scars. But I let myself sing like myself when I drive, like I sang as a little kid, without thinking of anyones ears. Speeding and singing. I sing for the feeling of vibration in the hollow of my ribs, the different pitches ringing different parts of my body, …the subtle pulse of the heart in the chord and the forces of the curves pulling on my body, like I am flying: flying and vibrating. Some linguists believe humans sang before they spoke. Like birds, to the sun, to announce presence, to protect others, singing through the night, chanting to keep away the predators and through the day to find each other. We were a part of the cacophony, the languages of clicks and chirps and chants. How many on the earth still hold the frayed end of this thread? May that last person sing louder, sing until the whole earth vibrates with it and we remember what our voice is for, so no other woman believes they have to sound like a man to have authority, gravity.
It’s been a weird week in a weird month in a weird year, and sometimes I look in the mirror and think how odd it is to be human, to be woman, to be me. I watch the way I look, looking back at me, like I’m watching an animal in a zoo wondering what it’s like to be the real version of itself. And I have a hunch that all this weird is going to get me there, us there, to some place far more authentic, where we can finally see each and ourselves. The weird will get us there covered in scars, but it will get us there, voice and skin and all.
