Samara Bay - Permission to Speak: How to Change What Power Sounds Like, Starting with You

What we need is some old-fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the voice of authority and how weve come to construct it.

Mary Beard , Women & Power: A Manifesto

At my local indie bookstore on the Eastside of Los Angeles, I got to chatting with the cashier. She asked what I was going to call the book I was writing, and when I told her, the man behind me in the queuetall, redheaded, and rosy-cheekedpiped up with a guffaw: Permission to speak? Thats not something Ive ever waited for!

The cashier and I shared a delicious look. Precisely, sir. Precisely.

This bookis not for him.

When I was twenty-four, I lost my voice. I needed this bookpretty desperately. I remember most mornings Id be able to speak, my voice tentative but at least audible, but by evening itd be gone again. I would push through to talk during the day, feeling a constant scraping in my throat, the effort of it stealing my energy and thrashing my spirit. Something was very wrong, but I didnt know what. Was I sick? Was I broken?

I was living in Providence, Rhode Island, halfway through a graduate program in actinga dream I had fought forbut in truth, it was a terrible fit. I was desperately lonely, and now feeling ever more isolated because I couldnt even talk. I dropped out of the play I was in. I attended classes like a ghost, aware of my every impulse to communicate and how Id squelch each one. I stopped calling friends and my parents on the phone because it hurt too much. I definitely stopped laughing. Nights, in the dead of winter, I would huddle in the one-room guesthouse I was renting, drinking tea with honey, wondering what my voice was trying to tell me and why I couldnt just be normal.

It turned out, I had the beginnings of vocal nodules, pissed off little blisters developing on my vocal cords. I still have the alien-looking photo of my V-shaped cords the doctor captured by running a tiny camera up my nose and down my throat, and remember him pointing out where they were rubbing against each otheraka, at the wrong spot. It turned out, I had picked up a habit of speaking that was a bit lower than my bodys preferred pitch. It turned out, the fix was relatively minor. And with the help of a speech pathologist during winter break, I worked on a slightly new way of speaking that felt strange until it didnt, and ushered myself back into the land of the living.

But I was left with major questions: Why had I picked up this habit that had unleashed such chaos on my life? Had there been some sort of payoff for me to speak this way? Or was it simply bad usage, as the head of my acting program pronounced it in front of the whole class, with a tsk in his voice, when Id first returned from the doctor with the diagnosis. Like he was accusing me of messing up my voice on purpose. Like I could have chosen good, healthy speaking, but I chose bad insteadout of, what? Laziness?

And there was the question that took shape more slowly as I began to share my brush with nodules post-graduation and began to hear others stories: Was I actually abnormal? I wondered how many others experienced a hard-to-place, out-of-sync feeling between their bodies and voices. How many women especially, it seemed, spoke in ways that werent natural and free because they had heard whispers in their own heads that said: Youre not talking right. Or Youre not speaking up like you should. Or You dont sound like what powerful people sound likewhat is wrong with you?

Maybe youve heard these whispers yourself. Maybe youve even heard them voiced aloud by well-intentioned mentors or bosses who took you aside for just a word of advice. Maybe youve been the recipient of a gentle warning that no one will take you seriously if you keep saying like so much, or if you remain so soft-spoken. Or maybe youve been told you sound too angry or strident or pushy or shrill, or you speak with an accent or a particular style of speech that codes for unprofessional or undereducated, according to those well-meaning educated professionals.

Bad usage, bad usage, bad usage.

Empowerment gurus and memes everywhere say find your voice, but we dont talk enough about why these voices of ours may have gone missing. We dont talk about why exactly its hard to give ourselves permission to speak as readily as that jovial gentleman behind me at the bookstore. Spoiler alert: its not our fault. There is a certain kind of voice weve all grown up hearing that sounds like command and conviction. Its John F. Kennedy in the clips we watched in school and Winston Churchills rousing wartime oratory. Its Steve Jobs delivering his famous Stanford commencement speech and Tom Hanks sitting on the late-night couch charming everyone and Stephen Colbert bantering with him across the desk.

Look, its not their fault either; they just said what they came to say. But these menthese straight, white, rich, remarkably large menhave defined easy authority for generations. They are what being taken seriously sounds like. They are who a whole lot of our parents, and their parents, and their parents, reflexively offered the benefit of the doubt. They are who we tend to believe. They are our experts and anchors and leaders and heroes. They represent the standard voice of authority as much as a symmetrical, light-skinned, youthful appearance represents the standard of beauty, even if we know ogling dumb photoshopped pictures of models in magazines and influencers on social media will only make us feel inadequate. Sometimes, when were not being vigilant, we dont even realize were doing itwe just dont like the way we look.

The problem with the voice standard is the same: when you or I want to become experts or leaders, were stuck trying to approximate the speech of powerful men, just as we might feel stuck spending too much time debating injections or trying to lose that extra weight. And maybe you dont even realize youre doing ityou just dont like the sound of your voice.