Muting

CN: body image

My life is sewn with sound. It structures my frittering of the days, and I spend too much time thinking about how to convert sound into feeling on both a physical and emotional level.

When I write a song, it’s my body that functions as the SF and FS converter. The meanings of the words I choose matter because they’re the mechanism for audient understanding, but there are many words that could be used to tell the same story. In my quest for the song, I rely on the feedback of my lips, my tongue, my larynx, and my breath. It has to taste like the truth. The oral cavity is manipulated to move formants and alter the balance of overtones. I listen intently to what my body tells me and to how it feels.

This body that I despise, because I have been taught to. Not all the sounds are good, or kind.

My mother hates her body/We share the same outline/She swears that she loves mine/I blur at the edges/I’m all soft shapes and lines/ Shapeshifting all the time. — My Mother & I by Lucy Dacus

Beyond the grotesque size and non-conformity of shape, my body also converts silence into feeling. The voices in my head belong to a skilled provocateur, capable of persuading me that as bad as things may be at any given moment, they will almost certainly become worse and it’s most likely my fault. They’re the source of discomfort on a bus. In a hallway. Wherever in public there are people, or even just objects to remind me again of the thing my own unheard assassin would never let me forget.

The harder voices are those of friends. Jokes and opinions that fail to reflect an empathy for my disgusting existence. These hurt especially in my case, because as I interface with the world through sound, I hold much more tightly onto the sound of voices than I do faces. So, when I read things, it has the effect of an auditory invasion and a soft betrayal.

I had but a couple of days ago felt as though there were some discernible path forward to a resolution of some of the current challenges I face. But that has been cast into doubt, and now a flood of voices rushes up in my head to steal away the blue sky.

How do you mute sounds that don’t speak? How do you filter and amplify the euphony?

Make the most of your moments/Content in your clouds and your dark skies/Learning to sail in all weather/On sea and sand/River and land — (Learning to Sail) In All Weather by Josienne Clarke