The A Side ✔

9- Finding The Voice

I didn't want to talk.

I didn't like to talk.

Is it OK to hate what my voice sounds like?

When I was younger, something wasn't quite right with my speech. My family and my teachers in Primary School picked up on that fact almost immediately and at five years old, was assigned a speech therapist. As a baby, I had a few health scares, one being that I was born deaf which was confirmed to be false but another was the part of the brain that controls speech was damaged leaving me unable to talk properly. This was proved to be false too but, as a slow developer, my English wasn't up to standards.

I don't remember much about the various speech therapists that I saw but I do remember all of them writing out different words on pieces of coloured card and I had to repeat out the words and count all of the syllables. Sounds quite basic right? For me, it was a sheer struggle. What also affected my speech then and still now to this day was my shyness. I tried to avoid any major social situations in and outside of school. Preferring to take a back seat has always been a part of me. I'm not one for any sort of flair ups between people and that has helped but also hindered my development as a person. 

My old school had a specialism in performing arts so the three main subjects under that spectrum were Music, Drama and Dance. I was in no way a dancer, I hated acting but I loved music and had been since day one. In Year 8 just after my friend passed away, I started singing along to various chart hits that were blasting out on the radio at least 50 times a day.

Only Girl In The World, Firework, Club Can't Handle Me just to name a few songs. My parents have always told me that I have a good singing voice. Two of my cousins are involved in music but the strive for me really wasn't there at all. I just wanted an escape from all of the sadness surrounding the death of my friend. I would grab by IPod, go onto YouTube, select a lyric video and just start to sing along. I even received a karaoke machine and a selection of CDs as a Christmas present. But as I got older, the more confidence I lost and just two years later, I ended up selling the set of CDs and the machine to a young family. My self-esteem just couldn't handle singing at all.

At age thirteen, I joined the school's choir. First on my own then I managed to rope my best friend at the time to join me. For a few months once a week, we were good, having fun and making some friends. But in the New Year of 2012, all of us had a meeting to discuss the Spain performing trip. All those that weren't going to attend were asked to leave the choir. I couldn't afford to go and with my Anxiety anyway (It wasn't detected at the time of all of this), going to a foreign country without my parents beside me was totally out of the question.

I liked to sing alone, I had one guy once serenade me in front of the whole class which was a nice gesture I suppose. But it was better than having nasty comments about different qualities you had since forever yelled back at your face.

Song-writing has been an escape. I used to write and put my own songs up on Wattpad but within the last six months, I've removed all but a couple of them across my novels. I felt that my songs at the time helped me a lot to deal with various traumas but at age eighteen, it wasn't going to help me now. I still have them saved in my drafts but I once nearly had one of my song lyrics plagiarized from me. I am very wary now about sharing my song-writing online, I think for me and the moment, it's going to remain a personal thing.

Off of Wattpad, 95% of the time, I have my Sony headphones on, plugged into my iPad and flicking through my various song libraries on my iTunes selecting tracks to play. I'm into just about anything but i'm picky when it comes to Hip-Hop. I don't like Kanye West but I like Jay-Z for example.

I promised that this chapter would talk about my writing but I've only scratched the surface on it. In a few chapters time, I will talk about my personal writing journey.

This journey that I will be writing about in the next chapter is my own Wattpad journey. And for all of you super fans of how my writing struggles came to be and my various stories fading away, you'll won't want to miss this.