Where Is Your Voice?

I was a late-bloomer dating a 27-year-old bass player whose every utterance I was committed to overanalyzing. I didn't exactly have time for academic rigor!

I recently went through boxes of old schoolwork my mom had kept in the garage. Unlike the system I use with my kids’ endless papers which is to have no system, my mom kept it pretty organized. She was a hoarder with a plan!

What a journey I went on: from reading my grade school papers and admiring my precociousness to reading my college essays and wishing I could be liquified and poured down the garbage disposal.

Repeatedly my professors complimented my ability to summarize someone’s argument and then chided me for not pushing the argument further, engaging with it in any real way, or putting more of myself in the paper.

“Now, THERE’S YOUR VOICE!,” one of them said when I wrote about death, which feels very Gen X. Apparently this was an ongoing conversation we were having about my lack of voice.

The thing is, I have no recollection of this. I have no memory of this being the kind of comment I received over and over and over.

I would go as far as to say, apparently, this was the story of my college career but I only realize that because I just sat down and read four years worth of this kind of comment.

There was one paper I couldn’t even bring myself to read. “This is the one,” I thought, stuffing it back into the box.

AlIow me to explain. I had noticed that cultural criticism was written in a very dense and to me, confusing, way. It was abstruse. I could barely understand it.

And so I decided I would write a paper in that style. The style, apparently.

Which is like saying French sounds like a bunch of random syllables strung together so I will write French by stringing a bunch of random syllables together.

The professor’s comments were something like, “I know you write a lot and take writing seriously—” [Note: I was already writing for magazines at this point which formed the crux of my identity and if there had been t-shirts available that said “already writes for magazines” I would have worn one. This is what the professor was referring to.]

“…so I am surprised at how imprecise and [some other word here] your writing is. “What was that other word? Imprecise and sloppy? Confusing? Immaure? Babyish? Lame? Embarrassing? Virginal? Fat?

In another English paper I said lay when I meant to say lie and the comment was, “Alison, it is shameful for an English major not to know the difference between lay and lie! Please learn it!”

Here is the thing though, I don’t think I understood how to write a college essay. I could do the summarize part, but then where I’m apparently supposed to “challenge” the idea? Not so much. I barely understood these arguments let alone was able to apply some kind of academic rigor to them. Plus I was a late-bloomer dating a 27-year-old bass player named Jeff who was pretty lukewarm on me and whose every utterance I was committed to overanalyzing so I just didn’t have the time!

bell hooks thinks this or that? Great! So do I! Derrida says XYZ? Far be it from me to disagree. John Berger says something or other? Sure thing!

But the bigger problem and one that I’m worried doesn’t just characterize my college years but a little too much of my adult ones is the following: Where IS my voice?

Was it on The Adam Carolla show?

Sort of. But my job was to support. Arguably that’s why I lost my job, my inability to do that and only that.

I think of myself as someone with a strong voice but is that right? What if I’m just someone with a weak voice who’s loud about it?

And how much of my need to be liked and my fear of criticism or worse, ridicule, prevents me from putting myself out there in real ways. The comment section, literal and figurative, is the worst thing for someone like me, who loses sleep over being misunderstood by even one person hellbent on misunderstanding me.

Unapologetic!

I wish I were unapologetic. Do you remember Shane from The L Word? I’m straight but if I were to have a same-sex affair it would be with that character. The actress who plays her described her in an interview as “unapologetic,” and I remember thinking at the time that I am very apologetic.

Accuse me of being insensitive or racist or ableist or transphobic or mean or self-centered or bad or tone deaf or any of liberal society’s unforgivables and I will apologize before I even understand the specific accusation. This is not hypothetical, this has actually happened. Which isn’t respected, by the way. It just makes you look desperate.

Recently something happened on social media where a white woman was accused by other white women of being racially insensitive and she immediately apologized. A black woman stepped in and told her that not only did she not need to apologize because her original intention was clear but that no one respects this kind of submissive energy. I want to tattoo this exchange on the insides of my eyelids since I fear my personal fragrance is Submissive Energy.

Speaking of tattoos which I don’t have any of, I’ve often thought if I were to get any I would get Lena Dunham and the creators of South Park. (The fact that these are my go tos are why I don’t have any). I admire the way they are willing to create art that people find so incendiary and just keep doing it. Whatever you think of Girls or South Park, I’d rather live in a world where those shows exist than one where they don’t.

It takes people willing to be hated to create good art. And I don’t know if I’m willing to be hated. The minute I suspect it might be fomenting, I hush the fuck up.

I grew up in a house and then worked with people with big unpredictable energies. I know how to bob and weave my way out of the line of fire. But I worry I have done that professionally.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts I’ve been having.

But Alison, you’ve gone full ZIO on Threads, you might be thinking.

1) I haven’t and 2) zio is a slur and 3) shut up. Threads is my secret safe space where I yell at antisemites for sport and to exorcise something or other and I would prefer if no one saw it and I like to think no one sees it.