Love Your Voice

Love Your Voice

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Love Your Voice
Love Your Voice
My Journey From Vocal Injury to Recovery
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My Journey From Vocal Injury to Recovery

How Losing My Voice Helped Me Find It

Jessica Neighbor's avatar
Jessica Neighbor
Apr 10, 2024
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Love Your Voice
Love Your Voice
My Journey From Vocal Injury to Recovery
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Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I could feel something shift in my voice that winter night when I sang the high chorus of Stevie Wonder’s song, I Wish, “I wish those days could come back once more, why did those days ever have to go.” I was 25 years old and singing in a cover band at a dot com private party in downtown San Francisco, for a tech company that suddenly had more money than they knew what to do with.

That felt weird in my throat, I thought. But the band played on, people danced on, and I kept singing along. Once we finished our set, I snuck a chocolate-covered strawberry from the chocolate fondue fountain, collected my gig paycheck, drove across the Bay Bridge to my place in Oakland, and I did it all over again the next night.

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“I think I hurt my voice,” I confessed to my friend a few weeks later. Michelle was a singer who had been in the biz …

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