"... I hope I didn't break it."

Yesterday morning I woke up, showered, and made my into work.  Nothing special, just your average day of focusing lights on an empty stage and inhaling mood-altering carcinogens. If not for the ventilator, I would have felt like a twelve year-old boy in his stepfather's garage, but this is beside the point.

It comes in classic black, too!

The point is that I have recovered entirely from my week-long bout with laryngitis, which began a little more than two weeks ago and lingered for nearly ten days. Apparently, the condition is caused by a virus not unlike the one that causes the common cold, and the only proven method of getting better is to stop talking.

(This, for someone who makes his living by running his mouth.)

More than once during that time, I thought of Jawbreaker's closing track from their seminal 24 Hour Revenge Therapy:

"I lost my voice, I hope I didn't break it..."

It's easy to forget how much we rely on our voice, easy to take for granted that virtually all of our "important" activities rely on the invisible framework of the spoken language.  The voice is simultaneously a measure of one's agency and creativity, an indicator of both uniqueness and our ability to connect with others.  In other words, it is our way of separating "you" from "me" and then putting "us" back together again.

As an aside, this woman once told me:

"The world is my echo."

There are innumerable scriptural references to the this progenitorial power of the voice, the most well-known of which (at least in this society) is the Genesis account of the Deity speaking the universe into existence, "And let there be light..."  

How many of us truly appreciate this?  How often do we recognize that our words ripple outward into our environment, subtly causing our surroundings and realities to take on the tones and textures that originate somewhere deep inside our chests? The glottiis, the bronchioles, the larynx – ugly names that sketch out a map of how our words come into being.