Freeing My Voice
Song as healing instrument
The Stitcher lives deep in the cellar, so deep that it took me a long time to find her. At first I only sensed her as a vague movement in the darkness—shadow on shadow—until she unfolded herself, billowing into an expansive flowing shape. If you asked me to describe her face, I wouldn’t be able to do it, because it was her hands that immediately drew my attention. Those long fingers. Needlelike.
The Stitcher lives at the base of my throat. She sews my vocal cords together, muting my voice. Her job is to make sure that I move through the world quietly: stay small, don’t make waves. She does this for my protection.
I never wanted to be a choir kid, but that’s where I ended up. My aggrieved 11-year-old self could tell you all about how I longed to play flute in band with my friends, but my parents wouldn’t let me because we weren’t able to cover the cost of the instrument—my mom was in grad school and flute expenses were not in the family budget that year. So, I ended up in choir to fulfill my music requirement.
I wasn’t the only one who sulked my way through choir class. It felt like the dumping ground for everyone who would rather be doing literally anything else. Inevitably the choir teacher would move me—ever the quiet, studious one—between two friends who always spent the class talking to each other. The theory, I guess, was that I would form a kind of human shield that would prevent their conversations. But it never stopped them. They just whispered around me, as if I were invisible.
Around that time, I started getting into music. Really into it. I spent hours every day listening to the radio and watching MTV (also VH1, since MTV had an annoying habit of filling their programming slots with boring shows instead of actual music videos). The worlds of mid-90s pop and R&B music—and later, alt-rock—became my refuge. Whenever I found myself in a deeply uncomfortable situation that I couldn’t get out of (which happened often in those awkward middle school years), music was my path to dissociation. Just sing to yourself, replay the music video in your head, and you’ll instantly be far away from here.
The songs we sang in choir often felt stodgy or unrelatable to my stormy adolescent self, so I gritted my teeth and dreamed about how much better life would be if I’d just been able to play the flute, to be in band where everyone was friends with each other instead of this hellhole where no one cared about anything.
And yet, there were times when the singing felt almost… good? When our harmonies actually worked, or when we went to local competitions and heard other groups sing, I was sometimes so emotionally moved that tears sprang to my eyes—a fact that was way too embarrassing to admit to anyone, even myself. Maybe if I was an amazing singer, like the talented sopranos who always got picked for solos, I would be allowed to enjoy choir. But I wasn’t like them. I was just a lowly alto, biding my time in music purgatory.
In high school, a dear friend played Tori Amos for me and I fell in love. Those vocal runs, the strange and unexpected song movements, the often-inscrutable but deeply felt lyrics—all of it blew my little mind. I had gone all in with grunge for a time, and still needed that in my life, that incandescent rage flaring between moments of deep melancholy, the release of a good shout or scream, the whine of loud guitars. But singing along with Tori in my bedroom, I started sensing a pathway toward something else.
Once I got my driver’s license, Tori came everywhere with me. Under the Pink, Boys for Pele, Little Earthquakes—when I had the car to myself, I belted out every song on each album at a volume that surprised me. Oh, the freedom of having my own space! To be able to drive myself wherever I wanted to go! And my voice, allowed to fly free for the first time in probably my whole life. It felt so good that I couldn’t stop—it became something I did almost compulsively. If a song I knew came on, I would reflexively start singing along with it.
But if anyone else was around me, something would happen—my voice would contract, as if some internal volume knob had gotten cranked way down. This wasn’t a conscious move. It felt more like a physical limitation: I couldn’t sing louder even if I wanted to.
This became a recurring theme. Even after many years had passed and I’d started to embrace the fact that I actually liked singing (and perhaps needed it on some level or another), it kept happening.
Take, for example, the time I decided to record a song with my spouse so we could make a music video for my upcoming book release. He set me up with the mic and I recorded some test vocals. “Hmm,” he said. “Can you go any louder? Better if they’re in this range.” He pointed out the levels I was reaching for, and I tried to get there, but it was so hard. I was perplexed. Why was this happening? Why did singing or speaking in front of other people—even those who loved and accepted me—make my volume so much quieter?
It felt like there was something grabbing at my throat. Reaching a hand in and clutching the cords that were trying to vibrate out their music. Stitching them together.
I wanted to understand what this was all about, but my curiosity simmered along on the back burner for a while. Eventually some clues started popping up: first, I came to know the Stitcher during a series of IFS meditations. Around that same time, I learned of a concept that pointed toward a larger, more collective story.
The witch wound.
This wound, as defined by Celeste Larsen’s book Heal the Witch Wound (which I haven’t yet read, but it’s on my list!), is a collective, intergenerational, psychic wound that arose centuries ago, during the witch trials that swept through the world. It can manifest in various ways, but often shows up as an intense fear of speaking up and being seen.
I have written previously in this space about my fear of social rejection and how it has shaped many aspects of my life. I tend to think of this as a quirk of my individual personality, but perhaps the root is in fact much deeper. Perhaps it reaches down into a collective fear, a vast ocean flowing through people even today, people of all genders whose bodies carry distant yet vivid memories of a particularly brutal form of social rejection. How it felt to be burned alive.
Strange as it may sound to some, this makes a lot of sense to me. It’s the only theory I’ve come across that really captures the terror that arises when I put myself out there, even though I know rationally that being disliked or rejected isn’t actually going to kill me. (Probably.) It helps me understand why speaking up, using my voice, feels so extremely perilous.
Once I put these pieces together, I started to understand that strengthening my voice was going to be key for my healing process. I’d already spent years honing my written voice, and had been gaining confidence in that realm, but something was still going on with my physical voice.
And I knew that the answer was in the cellar, with the Stitcher.
I won’t go into the full story here (though perhaps I’ll get into it another time, so if you’re interested let me know in the comments). The very brief version: eventually I was able to say out loud—to a therapist I’d worked with for years and knew I could trust—things that had haunted me for a long time, finally releasing them. The Stitcher dissolved, and once she was gone, I felt a noticeable change in the texture and volume of my voice. Then, last summer, I stood on a sandy beach in a circle of wise and wonderful humans, who witnessed me as I ripped. out. every. stitch. And that made it official: I was ready to make my voice heard.
I was ready to sing.
Still, the journey is far from over. My voice still needs a lot of strengthening after a lifetime of disuse. But at least now I know that I won’t be walking silently down the path—I’ll be singing the whole way.
Song has been such a multifaceted coping tool throughout my life. A way to dissociate. A way to process. A way to release emotion from a place beyond words. It was the clue that led me to the Stitcher. It is a vehicle for my voice, this one voice that belongs only to me and which has been so small for most of my life.
And for me, song is also medicine. As my therapist has pointed out, singing is an excellent way to release trauma and is very soothing for the nervous system. Song can also be a pathway to the sacred, a way of touching into the divine—the larger divinity but also the little core of the divine that rests inside each of us. I like to think it reaches backward into the past—how many witches sang to themselves as they burned?—and to a future where the wounds that stitch down our voices have been, finally, collectively, released.
So if you’re ever in the car with me, I apologize for singing so loud that I drown out the actual singer’s voice. I apologize—but at the same time, I am not sorry. Because I need this.
And I’d love for you to join in with me.