I can still remember being seventeen years old, a voice student who wanted greatness so badly I could taste it. I was full of potential and just as full of frustration at the things that were getting in my way.

The biggest one was that I couldn't hold my attention on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, and I know a lot of you understand exactly what that's like. You might call it ADD, but I call it a trauma response. My mind was drifting off because I was carrying so much stress that it couldn't do anything else, and it went everywhere at once, so that staying with a single thing, one moment at a time, felt almost impossible.

And when I say my mind was chaotic, I really do mean chaotic, because it got so bad that I would feel myself leaving my body, my mind lifting up and out of whatever room I was standing in, and it would be years before I learned that the word for that is dissociation. At the time it was a brilliant little survival tool, and it carried me through more than I can tell you, but as I grew up and had to earn a living and build relationships that could actually hold, the very thing that once saved me slowly started to threaten the whole life I was trying to make.

Here is what singing does with all of that. It refuses to let you leave. You improve your voice one note at a time, and you have to be right there for every single one, because there is simply no version of it where you drift off somewhere else and the sound gets better on its own. Singing keeps you in the room.

That is why the practice matters as much as it does. Trauma loves to hijack the mind and drag you back through what happened, again and again, in a way that can feel completely outside your control, and yet the moment you sit down to sing, that can become the one place where you are fully and simply present, just you and the next note, and once you find that kind of presence in a single thing, you slowly begin to find it everywhere else too.

So that is the thread running through everything this week. Staying present.

THIS WEEK'S ARTICLE: The Forgetting Cure, or: I Thought I Invented Dissociation.​

Eternal Sunshine, Severance, the new season of Silo - they all sell the same fantasy: that if you could erase the memory, you could finally move on. I have some notes, because I came up with that idea first, at eight years old, lying in bed trying to delete every humiliation, and this one is about why forgetting cost me years and why staying present does what forgetting never could.

→ Read on Substack​

THIS WEEK'S VIDEO

📺 How To NOT Freeze Around Difficult People​

There's one place you can't afford to lose your focus, and that's in front of a difficult person - the kind who walks into a room and takes it over, and if you're recovering from trauma, you probably freeze the moment they come near.

So I finally posted the video about getting out of that. How To NOT Freeze Around Difficult People, built from the tools I've used since my late twenties: a breathing method nobody can see, what to do when you can't make a sound, and the one thing to say that ends the whole dynamic. Fair warning. It works, and the difficult person will not like it.

→ Watch on YouTube​

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST: Going Pro​

Almost a year into The Healthy Voice, the thing that impresses me most about my adult students is how seriously they take themselves, and it got me thinking about what being a professional actually means.

It's not about getting paid; it's about taking yourself seriously enough to show up for the work and never give up on it, and that's what this week's podcast, Going Pro, is about, inspired by Stephen Pressfield's Turning Pro. I get honest about my own fears, which spiral all the way out to homelessness and ruined friendships, because that is just how the mind works, and I'd love to hear yours.

Listen on Substack ​

📷 WATCH ME PRACTICE, NOW ON INSTAGRAM

I've started posting my practices on Instagram, and these are the opposite of polished: just me singing with no reverb and no autotune, going out of tune, missing notes, and why?

We've had two decades of everything sounding perfected to the point where you can't be blamed for hating every imperfection you hear in your voice.

I think it matters to hear your teacher sing, wobbles and all. The latest is me singing Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell.

​→ Watch on Instagram ​

🐦 COMING NEXT WEEK — VOCAL RECESS: CATCH THE WIND

Only in The Healthy Voice Community​

Wind is just air you can suddenly see. It moves the grass and the water and the leaves, and you know it's there. And that's exactly what your voice is. Breath you can suddenly hear, air that became sound. So next week we're going to work with wind, seven days of it, and each kind teaches your breath something new.

We start soft, with the breeze, the gentlest tip of breath into tone. Then the steady wind that teaches a note to last, the gust that shows you a strong start comes from the body and not the throat, and the whistle that finds its ring. Midweek we let loose with the storm, the big loud day where your voice gets to be enormous and still stay rooted. Saturday we rest in the still air, where it turns out the silence is part of the song too. And on Sunday, the whole sky, every wind you learned moving through a single phrase.

There's a quiet thread under all of it. Every wind passes. Every note is a breath you make, live in for a moment, and let go. That's not the sad part. That's the beauty of it.

Come breathe with us.

COMING NEXT WEEK — VOICE LESSONS

Only in The Healthy Voice Community​

Lullaby of Birdland, Week Four, and the final lesson in the series. This is diction week, where the focus turns to shaping the words, the consonants and the vowels, so they land clearly while the line stays smooth and forward.

BEFORE YOU GO

Now that we are properly into the fall season, I'm reshaping my schedule so that I can make a lot more room for private sessions, because working one-on-one with people is one of my very favorite ways to spend my time and to share what I know, so if you've been thinking about booking a session with me, and maybe you looked at my calendar at some point and just couldn't find a time that worked, this is your chance.

I would love to work with you.

Keep going — because the world needs your unique voice. 🎙️

— Bella

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