Stormy old weather. I sat in the Downs cafe watching redwings pretending they didn't mind the hail that was hammering down and carpeting the grass around them.I'm working through a bout of self-loathing. I handled the photo shop business badly, and should have just walked away. There are more important things in life to worry about. I can't trust my judgement as to whether the assistant was being snarky or just responding subconsciously; what my friend Suzanne describes as 'information'. The information in question being the way that I am perceived.
Walk on. Learn.
My New Year's reso (I don't do reso's, of course, but this year I am....) is to work assiduously on my voice until I am finally happy with it. Which means no longer being afraid to speak in case it 'outs' me, and not being 'sirred' on the phone.
Meantime, our Home Counties correspondent and mystery shopper (Hi, J!) tells me that Waterstones in Newbury have moved their copy of Becoming Drusilla back from Biography (whither she had relocated it) to the LGBT section. It is now sitting on a shelf next to an anthology of "BDSM Military Fantasies"...
Hmmm. Now wash your hands...
I was talking about Saturday night's storm with Geraldine. She recalled a Ted Hughes poem, which captures the feeling perfectly:
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet...
Dru...my twopenn'orth...you might choose to work on your voice, but do it for you, not 'them'. You are indisputably female, the error is 'theirs' not yours and the responsibility is 'theirs' to accept the reality of you. You do not need to take on their ignorance or prejudice or stupidity. Have belief, honey.
ReplyDeleteTo me, and I suspect to many, you sound absolutely 'fine'. When you open your mouth it changes nothing of my sense of you at all. Not that it's any of my business actually, nor my job to judge you.
Easy for me to say (though actually less easy than some...as I do understand exactly why you feel as you do -I need to deal with the same stuff). I know how bloody 'wearing' it all it is. I sometimes feel that before I have an exchange with someone in a shop (or some other place of transient interaction), I should hand over a 20 page press release, entitled 'What you need to know about the customer you are about to talk to', covering my entire life story and basic etiquette in responding to me! Then we can stand about for 20 minutes as they receive a crash course in basic manners. (Hey maybe you could give out the book and come back later!? lol)
Don't beat yourself up. Do what you feel best re the voice, or anything else, but do it for you, not because of society's ignorance? And by the way, I don't think writing to the shop was the wrong thing to do at all. We shouldn't have to face down morons in person each time it happens. We have rights too. x
PS Love the poem
I'm glad I'm following Jo. I agree with her. Also people of both sexes have a huge range of voices.
ReplyDeleteI wish I'd come across that poem when I lived with my parents on the farm.... I'm off to see if Ted Hughes ever lived on a farm
Yes he did
ReplyDeleteI'd like to work on my voice too... according to my mother before I went to school my voice was very deep but then I went to school and "learnt" that little girls voices are not deep - I want my deep voice back!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jo. I am doing it for me really. I just don't like my voice as it is, and hate the sound of it. So I am going to see what happens when I work on it properly. It's like my horrid handwriting I had when I was 11 or so; I decided I didn't want horrid handwriting, so I worked on it until I had a style I liked and that looked good.
ReplyDeleteAnother Ted Hughes farm poem I like is "Full Moon and Little Frieda", Anji. It reminds me of a place I know in Devon; I can smell the cattle in that poem. The neighbours down there said that some other neighbours had given Ted Hughes a side of venison, and he'd given them a poem in return.
Apparently, womens' voices are coming down in pitch, Caroline; I guess because culturally the Minnie Mouse sound is a thing of the past. Well, hopefully. There is more to it than pitch, of course; I found (well, K found) a thung on my webcam that changes your voice. When I set it on 'male to female', it pushes my voice to the top end of the female range, so that it sounds sufficiently different to my familiar voice for me to listen dispassionately. And it shows that my modulation is at least as important as pitch; the 'musicality' of the speech.
...you can get pills to deepen the voice of course, ...but there are side-effects, like beards and things :-)
I can do without the beard! But yes you are right - the musicality of a voice is important though without sounding sing-song!
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