kiya

I was talking with my friend Vic at the music school the other day - since he's one of the desk folks, our hangouts are punctuated with him having to answer the phone every so often, and the way he shifts into that...

... masking is a hell of a thing. If I say "customer service voice" you know what I mean, but there's also a particular register that's involved that's actually really complicated for me emotionally, but in ways that I did not actually notice before I was taking voice lessons.

My normal speaking voice resonates in my chest. (I think a lot about Heather Alexander, actually, who had a very deep speaking voice; I spent my twenties or so delighted by a female professional musician who had a deeper voice than I did. Of course, now that person is Alexander James Adams, and I'm me, and the irony runs even deeper. I wonder how much of the depth of preferred voice there has to do with gender.) When I'm relaxed, when I'm comfortable, when I feel safe, it stays there.

As soon as I start masking, I go into customer service voice (lite): my pitch goes up by at least a fifth, the resonance goes from chest to pharynx (full customer service voice gets more into my sinuses), the entire thing becomes artifice. There's some of this tonal shift that is, in my opinion, part of the intrinsic performance expected of people-classed-female; there's a register that we're allowed to use. It's not natural to me, but it's reflex, a policed reaction that has become automatic for safety.

(Other things I ponder sometimes: I was visiting a friend and we were both too crispy to do much more than collapse in the same space and occasionally have brief conversational exchanges that mostly I initiated. But all in natural register. Another friend came home, and he's very outgoing and chatty, and I am pretty sure I swapped into performance/masking mode in order to muster the capacity to engage with that, I think complete with register shift. I am also pretty sure the first friend spotted something happening with the swap; I caught a fascinating expression in there, heh.)

I think most of the heavy masking I do involves this, the register shift up into ladyvoice.

And the thing about that is that aside from the masking, that's a register I hate speaking in. I notice myself cringing when I do it, particularly if I do it at any volume. And the thing that gets in the music lessons part is—

—early on in my voice lessons Rob was trying to get me to get a handle on a particular mixed-voice register and described it as "imagine you're trying to shout 'hey!' to a friend across a field" and I realized oh. I hate that. I don't want my voice to go there. That's the place where my voice sounds wrong to me. (We have done a lot of work on my mixed register, for the record, and I no longer cringe singing it. Still can't abide speaking in it without having the ughs.)

So not only is masking mode exhausting because I have to cosplay a socially competent human being, but the automatic register shift plonks me straight into I Am Simulating A Normal Suburban Female, Please Do Not Report My Deviances To Your Planetary Overlords.

Humaning. It's exhausting.

Vic agrees with me about the dysphoria of customer service voice.


(Interestingly to me, when I'm playing Celyn, I tend to use an even lighter register than that, much more into head range. But that's just how he is, the tenacious hope gremlin. I've noticed that M uses a deeper register for Izgil than his natural speaking voice. Characters is Different.)

For Pride I made a very long twitter thread.

Deliberately chose to limit replies so I would have the guts to post it.

There has been too much discourse.

(Clickie to embiggen.)

It is the time of the end of February traditionally known as "many packages for Kiya" because of the conversion of birthday money into books and occasional artifacts.

Which occasionally leads to me declaring that I am currently playing the part of whispercricket, who is the usual recipient of Many Package.

Today's many package was, I thought, interesting:

A copy of Stations of the Sun by Hutton;
a "nevertheless, she persisted" t-shirt;
the annual report from my church, with little welcome package of notes.


Meanwhile, in semi-unrelated things, I am poking at a questionnaire from church for a little getting to know you thing that one of the other new members is organising, and trying to figure out how I want to answer "If you could invite any real or mythological religious figure to give a sermon, who would it be and why?"

Um.

Okay, I knew the absolute worst thing I could do for my chronic pain stuff is stand still.

It turns out that it goes something like:

Worst thing is standing.
Next to worst thing is walking slowly.
Walking briskly is better.
Lying down is better.
Running is probably better than that but I haven't tested it empirically recently.
Sitting is better than running.
Sort of lounging is best.

Unfortunately, Art Fair has involved a lot of walking slowly because too fucking many people.

Gotten from nancylebov.

( Cut for length. )
I think I'll do this pagan questionnaire from luellon too!

( More cut. )

I was dinking around with the aspects in my natal chart and taking notes on them last night as a cooldown from one of the worst baby days ever, and found the results hilarious. As I just summarised in chat:

[13:20] [Kiya] My sun/moon/Mercury aspects boil down to:
[13:20] [Kiya] "You are so creative that you need to stub your toe on reality a bit to make sure you remember it exists. Fortunately, you're accident-prone."
[13:21] [Kiya] "It's a good thing you're a completely lazy decadent ass because otherwise your poor impulse control and short temper would get you into a LOT of trouble."
[13:21] [Kiya] "You totally want to communicate all the time! It's just that nobody understands you."
[13:21] [Kiya] "Also you have self-image issues."
[13:22] [Kiya] I find this completely hilarious.

...

[13:26] [Kiya] Oh yeah. Also a tendency towards megalomania.
[13:27] [Kiya] ... and theological analysis.

From a conversation about the bio I intend to send with an anthology submission, which includes the sentence, "Her fiction has a nasty habit of exploring the experience of the outsider, whether she intends it to or not.":

I paged Brooks with 'The writing comment is sort of self-referential, as the piece itself is about the experience of the outsider. ;)'.

Brooks pages: Yeah.
Brooks pages: You do seem to be consistent that way, a lot.

I paged Brooks with 'Write what you know!'.

From afar, Brooks laughs and laughs.


... oddly ironic music selection, that.

I found myself thinking of that argument on rasfc a while back (was it really a few months ago? I'm not sure), the whole what is identity and not, and the claim that changes to the body don't change the sense of identity, unlike changes to the mental process.

I spent this weekend far more dependent on my cane than is normal for me even when I am using it. (Usually I need it for a day or two and then I'm more or less okay. This weekend I needed it to climb up the steep slopes of curb cuts.)

And one of the things that drove me completely bats about that dependency, about the limitation of the pain, was this steady persistent awareness that this is not me. And I don't have the identity I had as a child, when I could do nothing, be nothing, that did not run, but damnit, I can walk. That hurt, sometimes, more than the pain.

My mother tells me that my brother could never have riding lessons like I did as a child because his hip went weird on him too easily. And muses about her need for a hip replacement.

Who am I, in the bone?