I stand in front of a floor length mirror like I’m about to do the chicken dance. My hands are on either side of my ribcage, wrists facing forward so I can feel my lungs expand as I inhale. I release the air into the small room, “Ahhhhhhhh…” first with some reservation, then committing. I’m not singing. The sound isn’t pretty. It’s about as elegant as the sound I make during a strep test. I guess you’d say, I’m vocalizing.
“Yes, yes! Louder,” Amy coaches.
“...ahhhhhhhhh…”
“Bigger.”
“....AHHHHHHHH…”
“Expansive,” she adds and this time she opens her arms into a balletic first position transitioning into second. I shift my arms, preferring the ballerina to the chicken, both as a cue and for appearance sake. I’m uncomfortably loud.
”Amazing!” she says.
As compliments go, this one will take some getting used to.
When your sister is singer, actress Idina Menzel–I call her Dee–it’s easy to get appointments with the best ENT and voice therapist in Los Angeles. But as someone who doesn’t consider herself a vocalist, it’s odd that I need them.
This past summer, my voice started to change. I needed to clear my throat all the time, but couldn’t. My voice sounded stuck in some falsetto range, like my ears were mildly water-logged. When I tried to project, my voice crackled and shook. My neck was stiff, my glands swollen. The change didn’t happen all at once—at least if it did, I didn’t recognize it. But my sister and I were about to publish our first children’s book and there was a growing list of radio and tv press engagements we’d be attending. So I became aware of my faltering voice in a way I hadn’t been before.
I was diagnosed with a “medication-induced essential vocal tremor”—a mouthful, for sure. Likely the result of one of the three anti-anxiety, antidepressants I take as part of a regimen I spent ten years fine tuning. I’ll spare you the details because, let’s face it, you don’t really need the medical info to appreciate the ironies of my predicament, the greatest of which is that the book we’d written was titled, “Loud Mouse: How a little mouse found her big voice.”
Even if my psychiatrist could be sure which of my medications was causing the tremor-–which he could not—it could still take up to a year after cessation for the tremor to stop, making it that much more difficult to be certain the actual culprit had been omitted. Moreover, nobody wants to start messing with their meds before a press tour. Even if I was lucky enough to have my voice returned immediately, I couldn’t bear any more irony; a perfectly pitched, well-articulated emotional meltdown with Joy Behar and Whoopi is not a win in my book.
The sense of urgency was resolved with a handful of vocal exercises—think of them like physical therapy for your voice— from Amy, a voice therapist. For the first time, I was the sister doing voice exercises in the steam shower!
Loud Mouse features a refrain. The mouse protagonist uses her tail as a microphone and sings: “With my tail in my hand, my whiskers out proud, I sing it big, I sing it la, la, la, la loud.” When Dee and I share the book with children, we encourage them to sing it la, la, la, la loud, with us. And throngs of kids in school gymnasiums and bookstores scream and shout as we sing together. So much so that we’ve had to come up with a system for quieting them back down so we can finish reading the book. Dee and I laugh because essentially we’re saying, “Yay! Get loud! Isn’t that fun?!... And now shut up.”
Before the book’s release, I worried a little about having to sing the refrain with my sister, identifying more with the karaoke of Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend’s Wedding than Idina Menzel singing, well, anything. I didn’t want to be the hypocrite telling kids to sing it la, la, la, la, loud as I worried about doing the same. Also, I’d been an elementary school teacher for nearly fifteen years. Reading books with children was one of the highlights of my life. I was good at it. I was great at it. Now I’d co-written my own book to share with them and I wasn’t going to let a little refrain get in the way of enjoying the moment. More importantly, I wanted to authentically embody the book’s message: Being seen and heard is complicated because it makes us vulnerable. It can be uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
I was ready to do it anyway. My body, on the other hand, had other ideas.
I don’t believe the vocal tremor is a coincidence. But I also don’t believe it’s purely psychosomatic. Instead, I think we all have places in our bodies where we hold stress. For whatever reason—and I have ideas—mine is my throat. If a medication is going to cause a tremor, it won’t just make my hands shake, it’ll destabilize my vocal cords.
I continue to work with Amy post press tour. I do breathing exercises with metal straws that I wish were stirring cocktails. She massages the front of my neck, my throat, even the soft tissue under my chin. Mostly, I sit on a director’s chair with Amy behind a snowboard-sized keyboard. A neon sign that reads “Do what you love” hangs on the wall over her head—I do not love this, I think. She reminds me to support my breath as I say “ahhhhh” or release a sustained “one, two, three, four…” or sing scales in thirds, in fifths, all with my arms in first position, or imagining an orange in the back of my throat, or while sticking my tongue out. She admits, “It’s ridiculous, I know.” But feeling ridiculous isn’t the same as being ridiculous. The truth is, something is unfolding in this little room where I get praised for being loud. For one thing, the minute I’m self-conscious, I notice that my voice wobbles.
“Keep going,” she says. “Just add more support.”
This marks progress. I often start out wobbly and then get louder as I find the support in my body to stabilize my voice. But then she wants me to come out of the gates strong.
“Start big,” she says. “Bigger.”
And that’s scary. It was scary even before I had a tremor.
It’s not often women are praised for being loud. Loud might as well mean too much. I’ve certainly been criticized for it. And not only by men, by women. During my masters program in elementary education, I had a professor call me at home to confront me about my behavior in class. According to her, I was inappropriately challenging her. I’d made an academic career out of being the teacher’s pet so I was caught off guard by her accusation. I was mortified that my participation had been interpreted as anything but engagement and asked her for an example. Her description amounted to speaking up too much and asking too many questions. Years later, I had a principal who expressed an interest in having me play a literacy leadership role in our school. When I pursued the position, I was criticized by my peers. Someone else had been in the role so I was perceived as selfish for wanting it. Female elementary educators must be nurturers, caretakers. Ambition isn’t well tolerated. And before all that, back in high school, I was sexually harassed by my internship supervisor at a local business. Among other things, he held a screwdriver to my low back and said, “Watch out. You might get screwed.” When I told my guidance counselor who managed the school relationships with the local community, her “guidance” was that things had to be handled delicately—another word for quietly—which she meant literally and figuratively because the guidance counselor in the adjacent office was in a relationship with the perpetrator.
I learned that a degree of caution should accompany any attempt at being heard. I learned to be apologetic, for speaking up often caused trouble. Speaking up was also presumptuous, it assumed others wanted to listen to me. Speaking up was self-indulgent, it assumed I was worthy and that I had something of value to add. I learned these were bold assumptions. But I also wanted to be bold.
When you’re the sister of a celebrity and you’re working on projects together, speaking up gets more complicated. Even with her love and advocacy, nepotism breeds a unique form of imposter syndrome. Have I sufficiently earned my place in this seat next to George Stephanopoulos? On this panel with Anna Quindlan? In this Zoom room with Disney execs? And on this call, how many ideas can I have without being overbearing? Am I allowed to disagree? Can I have expectations? How many?
Amy has me record our sessions so that I can listen to them independently and do my exercises daily. This in itself is an emotional hurdle. I don’t like to hear my own outgoing voicemail message, and now I have to listen to a growing number of audio files where I hold strange sounds as long as I can. But I hear Amy chime in, “Yes, really great!!” If the positive reinforcement wasn’t so liberating, it would be comical. I can’t help but take it to heart—I recall the neon sign, maybe I love this after all! She not only gives me permission to be big, strong, and loud, she gives me a context in which those are the right ways to be. As a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser, what’s “right” matters to me. I’m a mother and a teacher and a writer and a little sister. All roles that to my mind, appropriately or not, have a soft side. I’ve had a lot of success in my life as the soft and kind version of myself. I feel safe in that identity. I’m invested in that identity. I don’t want to trade the old version of me for a bolder version. What I want is to be all of it. All these things. I want to be kind and I want to kick-ass. I believe these attributes can coexist. I believe they’re the perfect pairing. Right up there with my other favorites: ice cream and red wine, profanity and children’s literature.
Our second book, out this September, is called Proud Mouse: How a little sister found her own way,” or as I like to say, “How a little sister learned to speak the fuck up.”
Through everything you've endured while fighting for your voice, you are authentic at every turn. That is why I follow you; you are kindly, honestly, insecurely, and bravely authentic. You are such an inspiration to women - touchstone for finding our way through the tough to reach those golden moments. I am so happy you were born.
This is beautiful and I identify so much with the last paragraph about wanting to be soft and bold. Life goal, for sure. ❤️