This episode was recorded in my car as I was driving home from an appointment, so the audio is a bit rough. It clears up again partway through, but then I start talking about dead bodies and necromancy. So… listen at your own risk. ;p
With that disclaimer in mind, I’m going to be talking about the episode I didn’t make. The following includes some events from my childhood that shaped some of my insecurities, and then we’ll circle back to the topic of being a… ghost. Or ghost-like, in a sense.
It is a little bit ironic that the episode I did late was the one on “voice”.
I couldn’t find the space or the words to talk about stuff, and I just… got so tripped up! But, I started to realize that even with my own prompt questions, the topic of “voice” was very broad, because it wasn’t just about non-speaking or very quietly speaking; it wasn’t just the regulation of speech, it was the… the kind of invisibility feeling that can prevent you from speaking.
It’s like there’s this wall, and it’s partly one that I’ve put up, but it’s partly one that others, I think, have put up. It partly grew itself. It’s like when I speak, I’m trying to speak through this thick, bulletproof glass, and it’s very muffled from the other side.
I can hear myself, because it echoes in there, you know? It’s this little box. But, from the outside, it’s very muffled and you can’t really hear me through it. You can hear that I’m speaking, but you can’t hear what I’m saying; you can’t hear the words, and it doesn’t really make sense, and so you just kind of… ignore it, I suppose. Or, you say “What?” enough times, and can’t really figure it out, and get frustrated.
I am also frustrated when that happens. So, I get it, but it’s not really… my fault? It’s not really something that I’m willfully doing.
I remember some very specific situations in which speaking was complicated, or singing was complicated (because I also love to sing; the impulse to sing comes pretty naturally to me, all things considered).
So, the first one I’m going to tell you about is this one:
I was in a class, and… I don’t remember what the point of this exercise was, but everyone in the class (and this was in, like, elementary school–this was early on) was coloring the same picture of this… fish. It was just a fish with scales and we were coloring it in.
And then, we were called upon to go up to the front of the class and share our coloring page, and I… did not want to… but I felt that I was unable to refuse, like I was being forced to go up there and show it. But I was not satisfied with my work, and I did not consider it presentable, and… I did not want to deal with it, so I went up, and I showed it off, and I was very frustrated from the moment I got out of my chair, because I didn’t want to do it, and I was…
I got overwhelmed very quickly, because I had no coping mechanism for this feeling, yet, and it was just gonna… it was just gonna get me. The emotional regulation was not there, and so… they all started clapping, and I went back to my seat, and I sat down, and… to, like, justify my frustration to my friend before I leaned down on my desk and just put my face in my arms, I said, “That’s why I didn’t want to go up here, is all this stupid noise.”
They were clapping a lot, and I didn’t feel that it was warranted. I didn’t feel that it was sincere. Uh… I didn’t understand… why… I didn’t understand why I had to go up there. I didn’t understand why they were so, like–Clapping is a show of… of… You’ve done a good job. You’ve done a good thing. And I did not feel as though I had earned it, and I didn’t… I didn’t want it, at that point. I didn’t even want to go up there. Like, none of this made sense to me. None of this added up to the right outcome.
And so, I just… like… the clapping was just the most immediate thing in my brain when I felt that I needed to excuse myself from my friend sitting next to me, so I could just, like, chill out in my little arm cocoon that I had made for my face, and that was going to be that, and I thought that was acceptable, and I did it.
And then this… very annoying little boy, named Joe–I’m pretty sure it was Joe, because he was very small and very annoying to make up for it–He kinda half stands out of his chair, and points, and–at least that’s how I remember it, but who knows, because I’m pretty sure I still had my face in my arms–and he says, “Mariah says we think she’s stupid,” or something like that.
I’d said “I didn’t want to go up because of all the stupid noise” and it telephoned immediately into “Mariah says we think she’s stupid”.
Looking back on it, that was all wrong. I thought everyone was stupid. I thought everyone was stupid. And that sort of included my mediocre work in the field of coloring, and it also included other people’s nonsensical behavior, and… whoa, did I not need that.
And then the teacher came over to me, which was exactly the opposite of what I wanted in that moment, and she tried to console me of, like, “Oh, we don’t think you’re stupid, and we don’t have to clap for you if you don’t want us to.”
And I was like: Boy! That is also not the problem, either! I want you to clap. I want you to think that this is good–but I also want to think it’s good, and I want it to feel deserved, and I don’t understand why you would clap when it’s not sincere, like it’s just a routine, and that makes the clap meaningless….
And I could not explain any of these things, which was awful. Because I was just… so… overwhelmed, and I couldn’t… make voice happen, because my throat was constricted and had that was more likely to just sob than to actually speak words, and that was not going to be helpful, and I didn’t want it to escalate like that. Once I start sobbing, then I’m just, like… gone. And I knew that, even then, and even if I didn’t consciously know it, I acted on that. It was bad!
I didn’t want to cry in front of people, because they didn’t understand and I knew that I couldn’t explain myself well, while I was feeling very emotional about stuff.
There was no space to process in that moment, and there was nothing… Now that I know what autism looks like, and feels like, and it’s probably me, now I can see it through that lens and realize why that happened and how it happened, rather than it being just one of the most baffling moments in my elementary life.
It’s nice to know, but it would have been nice to know then, so that I could, you know, parse it, and prepare for the next time or something, but… no.
So that was one of the times where I just could not… get my thoughts conveyed, could not express my feelings in a way that made sense. It was just a disaster.
That kind of sums up a lot of the time that I feel like I want to express something and don’t feel like I can. It seems to come back to that whole fiasco, as a comparative moment. That’s the first time (probably) that happened and I consciously remembered it, and now we… Now it’s there. Now it’s there, in my mind, and that’s what it is.
The next story I have is one where I was sitting in the back seat of my mom’s car (I always sat behind the driver’s seat) and it was near Halloween, because the little lyric that I was repeating to myself, over and over and over and over and over again was something along the lines of: Don’t be scared of Halloween.
And I don’t know… it wasn’t–I wasn’t saying that to myself (I love Halloween). It was me being excited for Halloween and conveying that it’s not a spooky time. It’s a celebratory time. And I wanted to write a little song about it, but I couldn’t think of any other lyrics, so I just sang my tiny little refrain over and over again, which was only one line.
And my mom just, like, snapped, and she was like, “Stop. Stop singing. Stop repeating yourself.” I don’t even know what she said. It might’ve just been “Stop it!” you know, and I was kind of left to figure out what that was.
So, it was one of those things where, at one point in time, I was able to just… experiment freely with whatever I was doing, in the space where I was, and just be content with that.
But, that was one of the earliest times when I realized I had to be… polished, in order for something to leave the space of my body, my head. It had to be done, and it had to be polished, and it had to be… apparently not repetitive. Perfectionism, Stage One, is kind of where that went. It was like, “You’re not allowed to experiment. Whatever it is that you’re working on, it’s bad and I don’t want to hear it.”
I know that [my mom] didn’t ask if I was afraid of Halloween, because… I wasn’t; that was pretty known. She didn’t ask if… it was a song? That would’ve been an obvious question, something like, “Did you hear that song? Did you make that up? Who is this song for?” Anything that would prompt me to think of something else would have stopped me from singing the same line over and over in a loop, and would have encouraged me to move forward with it and keep processing, rather than just, “You’re not allowed. This is bad.”
Part Two of that story is… I learned pretty quickly that I could still vocalize at a very quiet frequency. I could be very quiet and still hear myself, and still use my vocal cords and still process aloud, but I could do it in a way where people didn’t really notice me over the noise of their own speaking or whatever else was going on.
So, I practiced that for a while! And I thought that was a pretty okay compromise, because I was in my own private bubble, where I could vocalize experimentally–sing whatever ditty was stuck in my head at the moment.
But then there was a time when we were in a public setting. My dad was there this time instead of my mom, and I think we were in “coffee hour” at church or something. We went to church, and they had this hour of donuts and punch and coffee, and people would sit around and chat, and… basically, it was the only good part of church, besides the… listening to the music. Even if the words are debatable, music is music and the composition sounds very nice for church songs, because the people care about what they’re for–and that’s really the only requirement for good music is that someone cares about it… and does it well–but that usually does happen easier when someone cares about it.
So we were sitting at a table during coffee hour, and my dad was talking to some folks. I didn’t really care about the conversation that was going on, and I had a little song stuck in my head, so I was singing very quietly to myself. And… that seemed acceptable.
Until my dad heard me–which would have been kind of cool, that he was able to hear my quiet voice over the din–but he couldn’t quite hear it enough to know what I was singing, and that apparently bothered him. It would have been better for him if he hadn’t heard it at all, or if he had heard whatever I was doing at full volume. But the little at-the-edge-of-your-senses thing that I was doing was irritating him.
I think what he did tell me was that if I was going to sing, I should just… do it, you know? Belt it out, instead of being very quiet, but I didn’t really know how to reconcile that with my mom’s previous scolding. And I swear they had to have been not very far apart, in timeline, but I have no idea. I associate them with each other. I was told to not sing, and then I was told to sing louder. And there was no way to reconcile the two of those things, and I didn’t know what to do with that, and I kind of just… stopped.
I then would only sing in very private spaces. When someone was in the house, I would go outside of the house into… we had a camper, out in the driveway… and I would go into the camper–I would go into a separate box, and I would sing out there, where presumably they could not hear me through two sets of walls. Or I would go… Once I could drive, I would do all of my singing in the car, basically.
I would do some singing in the shower, because apparently that’s acceptable; people sing in the shower and it’s fine. But I would also shower in the basement, rather than the main floor where everyone else was–so I was on a different floor, in a shower, which was kind of noisy, because you have the water running, and the fan on, behind a door and, at that point, I might as well be outside in the camper because of how many divisions there are between my voice and other people.
Eventually, it just kind of came down to: I stopped having really anything in common with anyone else. Conversations would happen, and I would try to interject, but it never went anywhere–never became the new focus of the conversation, to my satisfaction, where I felt that I could keep participating in it.
And… there comes a point where I just don’t say anything. My role in the conversation is not to speak. And I don’t like it. I have thoughts that happen while conversation is happening. Or, I just… will not pay attention to the conversation. I’ll just do my own thing. Which always looks embarrassing when someone actually asks me for my opinion because they realize that I haven’t said anything in a while, and I’m like… “What was the question?” I neither know nor care at this point. I could say stuff, but it won’t be relevant, so… I don’t know what you want from me.
That’s just kind of the brief version of… my voice.
And I have other experiences with how I move in my body: It’s easier to be a statue sitting in the corner because bodies are awkward and they move weird.–That’s not really related to “voice”, but it kind of is, because this is expression, and if you can’t express yourself then it is very bad. It gets very bad for you inside. It feels simultaneously like you’re rotting, but also like you’re going to explode. You feel… dead. You feel like a dead body. There are circumstances where dead bodies will… fester with things, and bloat, and they might even pop, and–at the same time they might have rigor mortis–like, that’s what… That’s what that feels like.
My husband has problems where sometimes he gets depressed, and he’s very pessimistic. He has had times where he has contemplated dying, and sometimes he would rather just not exist, and I’m like: “No, I haven’t gotten to exist; I want to be alive now.” I would like the opportunity to be a living person, because right now I’m… not. I’m dead. I’m dead and I’m a ghost and, yet, I keep growing and I keep developing, and that doesn’t make sense–like, literally I am dead; none of this should be happening. And I… have so much similarity in me to a carcass and a ghost, that I just want to be alive.
Just let me be alive. Let me live. I want to live.
I want to live so bad that I can’t understand the other way around. I’ve already been dead for so much of my life. I want to be alive now.
There’s that moment in shows where ghosts say something, and a person who can actually see and hear ghosts responds. And the ghost has the moment of like, “You… heard that? You can… You can see me? You can hear me?” And I… that moment… What if the whole world just started seeing ghosts? I would be in that weird crowd that popped up, of: Hey, you’re visible now. People can hear you. People can see you.
And, yeah, I have unfinished business. Let’s talk about it.
To be clear, I don’t have that thing where I legitimately think that I am dead, because I see the functions of… You know, I can make basic comparisons. And I have a basic grasp on how… life–like, the comparison of life and death, and what that looks like in a human. And, as much as I feel related to dead bodies and ghosts, as much as I may feel like some sort of necromantic entity, I know that I’m not.
Actually, it makes me very sad that a lot of occult stuff like necromancy and witchcraft don’t exist in the form that they are presented in fantasy. When I think about that, I think that there is some kind of hope for me. Like, even if I live my whole life dead, maybe… maybe I’ll get to spend some of my death living. So… that’s some good old Lore interpretation for you, I guess.
And… that’s where I’m going to leave it [for now].
