Voice – A Multitude of Musings

Hi everyone. I’m joining Share Your World again. Loved this week’s questions. Here goes.

1. How would you describe your laughter? (giggly, deep, infectious? etc)
I think when I truly laugh out loud, my laughter is pretty deep especially for someone assigned female at birth. I don’t really like it, but I prefer it to my non-laughing voice. My voice is quite low for a woman’s, which I don’t mind, but it has some weird screechy feel to it. Eek!

2. What makes you smile?
Lots of things can make me smile, but I am told I especially have a wide smile on my face when recounting fun activities I’ve engaged in recently.

3. Have you ever cried with laughter, and if so, can you remember the circumstances?
Not that I remember.

4. Have you ever laughed at an inopportune moment?
Absolutely. I am an extremely detail-oriented thinker and this means I sometimes laugh at a detail that’s funny even though the bigger picture is rather sad. An example I’ve mentioned quite a few times is the moment a fellow patient in the psych hospital told us that he had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. He for whatever reason needed to name a staff member, but couldn’t remember her name so instead said “fat troll”, referring back to a moment he’d insulted this staff himself. I immediately burst out laughing.

Gratitude

For today’s optional gratitude section, I decided to look into BrainyQuote, an app and website with quotes on it, for a quotation on humor or laughter. I found numerous. Here’s but one of them.

Indeed, this quote shows that the line between satire and reality is often blurry. I in this light remember a story on a satirical Dutch “news” site about riots because an aggressive wolf had been shot. Two weeks later, it actually happened.

Welcoem to the letter V post in the #AtoZChallenge. This letter was very hard. No topic came to mind spontaneously, except for “vision loss”, which I already covered in my letter B post. So I looked at a book of journaling prompts which has, among other things, a prompt for each letter of the alphabet. The prompt for V was “Voice”. The attached question was to write about something you’ve always wanted to tell someone. I am instead going to write about the way I use this blog to express myself.

When I started this blog, I intended for it to be as free and open as a public place on the Internet could be. I didn’t want to feel limited by beliefs about what should be blog-worthy. In a way, I wanted this blog to be as authentic as my first online diary was, before I knew the impact of sharing stuff online. I would, of course, take care to avoid using people’s real names – something I didn’t do back then -, but I would not keep much hidden to prevent getting criticism.

Now, nine months on, I must say I reached this goal most of the time. Of course, there are still things I don’t share on here, but those are things that shouldn’t go on the Internet at all mostly. Like, I don’t go about describing an argument I had with my husband. In this sense, it is good that my blog isn’t like my first online diary, in which I did describe every argument with my parents.

I still do care a little about the quality of my posts, but that’s not bad. I mean, maybe I wish I were as open as some of my online friends are on their blogs, sharing stuff I share in small E-mail groups on here. That probably won’t happen. My inner critic is too harsh for that, and I don’t even know whether that’s a bad thing.