Shame is something that comes up regularly in voice work, particularly with folks who identify as “non-singers”. It’s pretty much a guarantee in the workshops I give, that someone or other will confess that they haven’t sung since they were a child because someone shamed them. They were told their voice was ugly, they were “tone deaf”, they were ruining the blend of the rest of the group, too loud, too shrill, too quiet…you get the picture. Inevitably, such people have internalized this shame and decided never to sing again because of it. And then they show up in this workshop, and they are introduced to their singing voice, and they discover that they have something to offer after all, and that the making of a singing sound helps them get in touch with a part of themselves they haven’t had access to (what I like to call the “Disowned Singing Self”): to literally and figuratively “find their voice”. These moments are humbling and beautiful.
People who choose to study singing and hope to sing for a living have their own special brand of shame. Much more often, this shame is internalized and repressed, present but unspoken. I want today to talk about this dark side of shame, in particular my OWN. As a professional singer for 40 years, and having sung in choirs and school for most of my life outside of that, the shame I feel has to do with the moments I felt I failed, either to live up to my own impossible expectations.
From the outset, the purpose of this blog has been to explore singing and the voice from the perspective of its intersections with identity. A parallel purpose was a willingness to be deeply honest and personal in this exploration. Unpacking my own personal shame history is a part of that. These are the kinds of stories singers are afraid to tell. Singing and my voice is so inextricably a piece of my identity that whenever I felt shame about singing, I felt it about myself.
A few months ago, I was having dinner with some neighbourhood friends. As we sat around the table, one of them threw a question out to the group in order to jumpstart a conversation: “have you ever been fired?” Pretty much everyone at the table had a story. Some of them were teenage missteps with humiliating consequences. Others were more dramatic stories of early or even mid-career job losses, with their attendant soul-searching and self-loathing. As I listened to their tales, I thought to myself “well, I’ve never actually been FIRED”, even though I knew I had come perilously close on occasion (more on this later). But suddenly I realized that I had suppressed one of the most painful memories in my career–when my contract at the Frankfurt Opera was not renewed after having spent 5 years in the house. It’s funny how, over time, the sting of something can be forgotten, glossed over, and we carry on as though nothing had happened. But all at once, on that January evening, the memory of that intense shame and humiliation came back to me in technicolour.
The opera house had just changed artistic direction, with a new General Manager and Artistic Director. As often happens in such cases, these folks wanted to clear the decks of most of the remnants from the former regime, and bring in new blood. As it happened, this period coincided with the time after the birth of my first child, when, although it wasn’t diagnosed at the time, I was most likely in the middle of my first of several vocal crises. It wasn’t acute at the time, but my voice had become untrustworthy, and some of my performances were not stellar. Still, I was good enough that I was continuing to be employed internationally, and my career continued unabated, with many successes. But the new AD wanted me out: I would have gained tenure and been un-fireable if my contract were renewed, so they cut me loose. I wasn’t the only one, and their tactics were similar with all of those who shared my fate. But it wounded me deeply. They had to justify not renewing me, and they had to supply reasons. So they called me in to the office of the AD and laid it out in the most devastating fashion: I had no personality, my voice was small and didn’t carry across the footlights, I wasn’t at the standard for a house of this stature. The intensity of the shame I felt at these accusations was formidable.
Although I knew that they said these things in order to protect themselves if I should try to grieve the process, I took them personally. I felt cast out, othered, awash in humiliation. My self-confidence was shattered, I felt unworthy. I even felt that people close to me lost respect for me (I do not know if this was true. It was simply the way it seemed to me at the time). I wondered if people felt I was washed up, no longer valid as an artist. Somehow there was no success I could have, no accolade after that that could redeem me. Henceforth, I was always just “proving”.
As a result of this, over and over I experienced a shutting down of my vocal abilities when the stakes were high. When I look back in retrospect, I suspect that in situations where I felt I would have to prove myself, I tried so hard that every muscle in my apparatus went into lockdown and I literally closed off my instrument. And this led to situations in Paris, in New York, when I had important debuts, where this scenario would repeat itself. I would literally strangle myself with this pressure, and suffocate in shame. And when my friends asked if I had ever been fired, I couldn’t tell the story. It felt too painful, too humiliating, still too real. I didn’t want anyone to know it. And that’s the price of shame.