My Phone Voice Had a Better Career Than I Did

I had a phone voice half an octave up, ten degrees brighter, so happy to help that strangers apologized to it. I didn't choose it. It showed up sometime around 1998, and answered on my behalf well into this century.

We all have one. Plus a work voice, a meeting-the-parents voice, one voice for the group chat and a slightly different one for the group chat about the group chat. Anyone who has walked into a room and felt the shift, shoulders adjusting, laugh recalibrating, opinions quietly filing themselves under "later," has already met the costume.

What I wish somebody had told me at nineteen is that everyone else is wearing one too. The loud guy at the party. The coworker who doesn't care what anyone thinks, which she mentions often. That person online who has life completely figured out is in couture. The costume is the entry fee for living around other people, and we all paid it before we knew what we were buying.

Where the costume comes from

Somewhere very early on, every one of us ran the same experiment. We showed the world something true, a feeling, a want, a weirdness, a softness, and we watched what happened. Sometimes the world clapped. Sometimes it went quiet, or made a face, and a face from your mother when you're eight is data you keep forever.

So we learned. Lead with the funny thing, bury the tender one. Be easy, be impressive, be whatever the room is buying that day.

I stitched mine together one small edit at a time, and I'll admit the part we all hate to admit: it worked. Mine got me through school, through family dinners, through an entire career I built performing for everyone but myself. I wore it so well I won awards for it. The plaque said Employee of the Year. It should have said Best Supporting Actor in the Role of Himself.

There's no shame in any of that. A costume that kept us safe deserves a thank-you.

When the costume starts wearing us

Wear it long enough, though, and one day we reach for the zipper and it's gone. Nobody announces this. We find out in small ways. Somebody pays us a compliment and it slides right off, because a small voice in the back says they're complimenting the costume. We come home from a party we technically enjoyed and need two days to recover, because performing for four hours burns more energy than anything I have personally attempted at a gym.

And then there's the strangest symptom of all, the loneliness that arrives in a crowded room. Not just any room though, I'm talking about a room full of people who love us. All that love aimed just slightly to the left of where we're actually standing, and something in us keeps quietly noting the miss.

I know that ache personally. It sat next to me at parties thrown in my honor. It took me an embarrassing number of years to figure out what it was: the real us, knocking on the inside of the costume, asking if it can come to the party too.

The gentle way out

Before anyone does anything dramatic, this is not permission to show up to Thanksgiving raw and unfiltered and call it authenticity. Please, God, no. Some rooms haven't earned our realness, and choosing our rooms is a skill we get to keep.

The way out is smaller and kinder and It starts with catching ourselves in the act. The phone voice clicks on, the opinion goes down the hatch, and instead of judging it, we get nosy about it. What am I protecting right now? Who taught me this part needed hiding? The answer is almost always somebody specific with a face attached.

Then, when a room feels safe enough, we test the seams. Say the actual opinion. Admit we hate the restaurant everyone pretends to love. Let one soft thing out without armoring it in a joke first, which I realize is rich coming from me. Then watch what happens. In my experience the room fails to collapse, and what happens instead is that somebody across the table relaxes an inch, because our little piece of realness just made room for theirs. I've watched a whole dinner party come to life because one person admitted they were struggling, and I've watched it happen because one person admitted the wine was bad.

The costume was built to earn us belonging, and to be fair, it earns some. The problem is it collects on its own behalf. Whatever love it wins stops at the fabric. The kind that actually reaches in, all the way in, can only be received by the person underneath. I checked. It took me a while, but I checked.

Keep every costume you own, darling. Just don't let one of them RSVP for you.