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Not being able to talk is somehow both extremely weird and extremely boring. I had a lot of time to think about this when I couldn't talk for six days last week.
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I want to say I lose my voice more often than other people, or than is normal, but I have no idea if this is actually true. I lose my voice more often than my friends do, I think, but then they're always surprised when it happens to me, and I'm like, how do you not know to expect this already? I came down with laryngitis once a year every year when I was in college; it happened for ten days at a stretch in 2015. One day my throat will be scratchy and the next I'm hoarse in the morning, mute by nightfall. I suck lozenges, swallow honey, breathe steam, drink tea. It lasts as long as it lasts.
I am trying very hard not to make this into a metaphor.
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What's funny, actually, is that for as many times as this has happened to me, I didn't start thinking about it like a metaphor until very recently. This even though the 2015 case ended over the course of a long, hot three day weekend which I spent sitting on the floor in my bedroom trying to come up with a new title for the book we ended up calling A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART-- a book that, you might know, is very specifically about the ways in which women do and do not allow themselves to speak. I mean I got the irony of the situation, obviously, but I didn't ascribe much meaning to it. That's the thing about irony, right, that it's funny because it's the kind of coincidence that suggests-- but doesn't actually hold-- the weight of significance.
I was throat-sick this summer, too, a bout of tonsillitis that touched off a host of other ailments. "This used to happen to me all the time when I was a kid," I kept saying. I don't get sick often, but when I do that's where it happens, and maybe I never bothered to make a metaphor out of it because there's so little making that needs to actually be done. The throat mediates between me and the world. There are so many uncomfortable words I've forced myself to say, and still somehow always there are so many more I've allowed myself to swallow.
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And it's not a metaphor, I don't think, so much as it is a shadow: not being able to talk mimics with vivid, painful accuracy the way it feels to be stranded, helpless, in the deep waters of a major depressive episode. I mean: you sit in a room full of people enjoying each others' company and you physically cannot participate. You think you might be able to tomorrow, or if not the next day, but also you have a lot of time to wonder: what if this never goes away? You are boring to hang out with and feel guilty about it; other people's attempts to engage or entertain you make you feel guilty for needing to be entertained or engaged-- especially because you know you won't even be able to return the favor. Making yourself understood requires painful effort and never really works the way you want it to anyway. I could go on. You feel yourself separated from the world around you by something invisible, and palpable, with its hands wrapped loosely but firmly around your throat.
I was driving somewhere with a bunch of friends recently, having a meandering road trip-type conversation, and the discussion turned to triggers: how dramatic they sound and how controversial they've become. In fact, we agreed, what they mostly provide is a useful term for discussing a fairly common occurrence: the way one thing happens in the world, and it sets off something else entirely in your body. The way we learn functionally neutral stimuli as warning bells; how even after the danger they were created to warn us of has long since passed, they set off klaxons in our heads, the kind of sound that demands so much attention that taking cover and turning it off takes precedence over figuring out what set it screaming in the first place.
Did you know there's a medical term for it? I mean, it refers specifically to the physical, but then again, what the fuck is the brain but a body part? Anyway it's called a sequela: the chronic condition that results from an acute infection.
Being quiet when I don't want to be: it used to be boring and now it's become part of my pathology. I got scared of myself last week in a way I haven't been in a while. It took days to quiet the noise of my panic long enough to listen to the inside of my head-- this even though I wasn't saying anything, and yes I made jokes about having committed to a single-person silent meditation retreat, of course I did-- and to hear that it wasn't anything happening now that was really scaring me. It was only memory that had me so impossibly riled: the recollection of a much deeper and more intractable kind of silence.