Social encounters are impossible to avoid. Even if I lock myself in my parent’s house like a hermit and avoid any contact with the outside world, my parents will still talk to me. It’s inevitable. Also, adding 10 minutes of speaking a day is important because I’m supposed to be restoring my vocal chords to their natural vibrations. If I chose just to keep silent, I wouldn’t be recovering. The point is that I do have to talk. The reason I bring up the social aspect is because it makes it way more complicated. When I was on total vocal rest, people understood. Easy. They didn’t expect me to respond to them vocally (well... unless they were clueless), and waited for me to write to them on my whiteboard. Now that I’m allowed to speak a little, everyone seems to think I’m cured. As a general rule, people don’t easily accept that I can be speaking to them one moment and then not the next. It comes across as rude or “Well... what’s the big deal in answering me? You were just talking!” It’s difficult enough for me to know when to stop talking. I have to count the hm’s and ha’s and it’s hard to know sometimes what it’s added up to. So when I’m around people who don’t understand, it makes it even more difficult. You follow? Sigh. Complicated.
Something else that I feel I should mention under this social subject, is my paranoia over possible injury and how that effects the way I respond to others. I find myself constantly annoyed with people. When men take me on dates to places that are loud then try to hold a conversation with me, I’m pretty close to livid. Maybe this makes me a diva, but it’s not like my voice problem is a secret to them... they just decide it’s not very important to worry about. Or when I say I won’t be able to talk to them at a hockey game and they say “you could just do some warm-ups before we get in and you’ll be good to go.” No. Arrogant ass. I will NOT be good to go ruining my voice on your self-absorbed company, thank you. I found that my mother says “huh?” or “what?” just about every time I speak. It also occurred to me that she doesn’t have a hearing problem, it’s a listening problem. If I choose not to repeat myself and just wait it out, it turns out that she actually knows what I said and will answer. Can’t believe I didn’t discover this sooner! Hahaha. Repeating myself is NOT something I will happily do lately. I keep finding myself in what would be super normal situations, but I’m the only one who understands how important my health is and it quickly ruins the fun. When my friends try to get me to smoke with them, for instance, I have to wonder what their motive is. Any good friend would say “Keep away! We’re going to be smoking and you have to take care of your voice!” Hahaha. Yeah right. I’ll admit that none of this is new to me. It reminds me of working on cruise ships.
Over and over again on ships I was forced to see that my best interests are not something people usually care about. I had to sing 4 hours a day 7 days a week so even BEFORE I injured my voice, my vocal health was my number one priority. It’s funny that of all the singers I knew who would get drunk, scream, and smoke while belting out crew karaoke, I was the one who ended up with throat issues. I was so careful on ships compared to anyone I know. It was frustrating that my friends didn’t care about me protecting my throat. Every night I’d be teased for buying water and people would refuse to accept that I wasn’t drinking alcohol. They would buy me a drink and I’d make them angry by turning it down when it was already paid for. Always, people would try to hold loud conversations or get me to sing along with the bar songs for some reason. They’d drunkenly say, “You’re a singer! Can you sing this? Sing this! Come on! Why aren’t you singing?? I know you can! Sing it!”. It has always frustrated the hell out of me that nobody knows how important it is to me to keep healthy and take care of my voice. A true friend would pat me on the back and tell me how proud they were that I was able to keep my priorities straight, right? Those people rarely surfaced. It felt kinda like I was a known alcoholic and everyone was teasing me for not drinking... or a kid with an obesity problem and everyone was shoving cake in my face. Smoking, drinking, loud talking, and extra singing were all things that were bad for my voice, but that’s all people seemed to want from me. I’m lucky in a way that I had the opportunity to learn early on that most people who appear to give a crap about you, actually don’t. If I were able to do all of these socially normal things, I never would have realized who really cares about me and who doesn’t.
I’m going to say right now that I recognize that it’s not all out of selfish behavior that my friends act this way. Sometimes it just comes down to being ignorant on the subject. What’s obvious common sense to me, just isn’t to some others. I don’t hold anything against people who don’t understand, I just choose when, and when not to, hang around them. It also really makes me appreciate the few and far between who are willing to listen and learn. I’ve accepted the fact that my career means more to me than my social life and I only hope that one day I’ll have enough friends in my life who understand me so that I can have both :) Oh... or that I develop vocal chords of steal and can REALLY have it all... well, lets go one goal at a time haha.
