Change Your Voice, Change Your Life by Mortin Cooper

Author:Mortin Cooper [Cooper, Mortin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0879804416
Publisher: www.voice-doctor.com
Published: 2018-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Sound and (Voice) Suicide

C HAPTER 5

Why “Suicide”?

The Sounds Of Silence

On certain days, those reserved for new patients, my office is one of the quietest places in town. In fact, if you were to place a blindfold over your eyes and be led (unknowingly) into my waiting room, you would perhaps believe yourself to be in some sort of sanctuary.

Lowering yourself onto the couch in this apparent den of tranquility, you would not feel alone, however. Doors would gently open and close. The soft rustling of movement would be heard as others enter, and then, in time, move to the inner sanctum—all without a word. Denied your visual perceptions, you might naturally conclude that you are in a monastery of some sort, perhaps amidst a sect that embraces the order of silence.

Letting your imagination take over, your mind’s eye now envisions a gathering of cloaked figures, all immersed in quiet meditation. You wonder how it is possible, if it is possible, to live by choice without the advantage of speech. Contemplating the frequency with which you use your voice, you begin to squirm in your seat. These sounds of silence are disturbing, for you know that you are not like these people in whose company you find yourself. Your curiosity building, you become anxious to see these transcendentalists, to observe them in their strange practice of quietude. Finally, pulling the blindfold away, you are confronted with—regular people. City people. Country people. A cross section of society, lacing the monastic garb you had mentally pictured.

Instead of monks, you find yourself among a teacher, a homemaker, a doctor, a lawyer. Present, too, is a rock’n’ roll singer. Also an actress and a well-known entrepreneur. And a recognizable television announcer.

The announcer is wincing with pain; the lawyer is gesticulating in unsophisticated sign language to the doctor; the teacher is saving what is left of her voice for the brood of students she must soon confront. The rock’n’ roll singer is possessed of no more than a raspy whisper. The homemaker sits in self-imposed quietude because her high-pitched, childlike mode of speech embarrasses her. As for the actress, she’s lost two feature rolls in the past month because of a regional twang, and has sworn not to utter another sound in public until she corrects what has become an occupational liability. For his part, the entrepreneur cannot speak. Try as he might, he is incapable of emitting a sound.

Dashed, now, are your illusions of this being a point of spiritual communing, though I hasten to add that I like to think of my office as a place of refuge.

And, having established that what all these patients have in common at this juncture of their lives is silence, the natural progression is to tell you why: Each has been committing one form or another of what I term voice suicide, the result of voice misuse and/or abuse.

Perhaps this expression sounds harsh to you. After all, the first part of this book dealt primarily with using your voice as a tool for success, which it can and should be.

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