After six months of semi-regular vocal practices, using one app or another, following one voice teacher or another, using the singing straw or doing lip trills, and singing along to every possible song on my YouTube list, I noticed that I had started to hum at random times during the day. I’ve been singing along to my Spotify list in the car and waking up with random songs playing in my head forever, but it’s been a very long time since I found myself randomly humming. Even after I realized I was doing it, I didn’t realize Mom could hear me. I thought I was just listening to my own soundtrack as I went about reading emails and typing essay drafts and playing silly games on my phone. When she mentioned that, by the way, she could hear me, I got self-conscious and stopped humming for a few minutes, but that didn’t last long. There was a song playing over and over in my head and it needed to escape somehow.
I’m sure I must have hummed at other times over the years without noticing it, but the last sustained period in my life when I remember humming to myself on a daily basis was when I was in elementary school. I spent a lot of time by myself in between classes, skipping down the hall singing along to whatever tune was playing in my head (and I still had no idea why the other girls didn’t want to be friends with me. Go figure).
I think I stopped humming out loud when I started seventh grade at a new school, because I suddenly had the opportunity to make new friends after being on the no-go list at my old school pretty much since kindergarten. I still sang all the time (or so it says in my eighth-grade yearbook), but only on purpose. By then, I guess, I had become too self-conscious to do anything un-self-consciously. It took a few more years before I stopped singing altogether, for a thousand little reasons that added up to me believing that singing was for other, more talented, more confident, more beautiful people. I even took voice lessons for a few years, but I didn’t have the nerve to sing in public or pursue music in any serious way, and eventually I stopped writing songs, and then I stopped writing poems, and music just sort of disappeared from my life. I’ve tried to bring it back a few times over the years, by joining the choir and practicing piano and learning guitar and then ukelele, but I still felt really self-conscious and like I didn’t have the right to sing on my own. I was fine practicing my choir songs at home, just to get the notes right, but I would keep my voice low and wear headphones so I couldn’t even hear myself.
Over the past few years, though, as I’ve been listening to the professional opera singer who stands behind me in choir rehearsals, something has started to shift. There’s something magical that happens when he sings; the notes fill the room and at the same time it feels like he’s giving the rest of us the oxygen we need to breath. I’ve never had the nerve to ask him for voice lessons, but listening to him sing inspired me to look for breathing exercises last year, and then this year, it finally pushed me to look for vocal exercises to try at home. It was a big deal to give myself permission to “waste” time on singing every day, but I was finally able to start about six months ago and develop a relatively consistent practice.
And then, last week, the humming started. I don’t want to jinx it, or scare it off, but it feels like the humming represents some bedraggled, neglected part of my soul starting to come back online. It’s still tentative and I don’t know where it will lead (I’m hoping I’m not on a direct track to singing randomly in the aisles at the supermarket), but there’s something comforting about the humming. I used to sing myself to sleep when I was a kid, singing stories until every detail of my life seemed to fit into a gradually evolving melody with real shape and structure. I would love to find life becoming a song again, but I don’t want to jinx it, so I’m just going to note down what’s happening and see what comes next.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 