The Weirdest Youtube Titles
Hey all. First therapy appointment in a couple of hours. Feeling a bit weird in general. Had a bit of a bad night and it took me a bit to process my emotions. It’s kinda dumb, because it wasn’t related to any sort of dysphoria stuff. Just a bad social interaction. I need to write my thoughts down to get through my emotional state. I went to sleep and it’s still kinda bothering me.
The essential situation was this. I was playing a shooter game with my partner. We’re in a discord with ~14 players and it’s a game set in the civil war with squad based gameplay. Fighting in formation and following orders is important. During our training rounds, I had my name called out a few times for making mistakes and I felt like I was getting yelled at, so I stopped talking as much and was trying to focus. When we got into the live round, I stayed quiet until we were engaged in the field. It was a chaotic battlefield lines of people popping up quickly. We died multiple times to bayonet charges from a treeline, and we did bayonet charges on a few groups in similar fashion. Early-ish in the round, we were lining up for a volley, and I saw movement. So I spoke up and called out. (Going off memory, quotes aren’t exact.) “Movement, south by southwest. I think it’s an enemy.” Then I got called out. “Cats, you need to say PTS before you speak in discord.” Which was then explained to mean permission to speak.
It took me sleeping on it and evaluating my emotions to really understand my problem. At first, I was frustrated, because I felt like I was being targeted. But in hindsight, I don’t think that was their intention. They were trying to correct the group. I was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The action itself was correct. I was having difficulty following orders, because of a lot of voice clutter. Afterwards, it was easy to understand what I needed to do, but I stopped enjoying myself because the nature of the coaching was poor.
Am I soft? Yeah. I've been very emotionally vulnerable lately, and I want to be. I've been bottling up my emotions for years. I feel better than ever. I was crying over this dumb game last night. I feel better for it.
I’m going to talk about it with involved parties, but I was flustered last night and I could feel myself getting angry at my inability to get through to my partner. But I was also having difficulty putting my problem into words.
Anyways. Now that that crap is out of the way, back to the fun stuff.
Involuntary sounds.
When I woke up, I was feeling a bit stuffy. I cleared my throat with my headphones on and I realized how deep it was. I’ve been kinda vaguely working on my laugh, but this isn’t something I had thought about. Coughing, wheezing, sneezing. Etc. I get bad allergies, so this is something that is going to affect how I present. So like all of my problems with transitioning so far, I went to youtube and typed it in. First few videos were just generic voice stuff. Then I went to reddit, got some ideas, and changed up my search criteria.
Yawning is easy, as the position I keep my larynx in leads to a naturally higher yawn.
Coughing wasn’t too hard, you want to let out an ‘ah’ or ‘eh’ as you cough. I did some more practice after this, but this was to demonstrate the technique. Sneezing is similar, but easier to pull off, since you typically have wind-up.
Essentially, for throat clearing practice, you want to hum in a high pitch while you clear your throat, which results in a brighter sound. This is a little harder to maintain, given the nature of clearing your throat.
Laughing is easy enough to fake, but a little harder to practice. I’m going to have to find some comedy stuff and listen to it to work on really tweaking my involuntary laughs. My pitch also needs a little work. I think my laugh needs to be higher than my default voice.
And here’s my check-in for today.
Overall, when I’m at my best, I feel like my voice passes. Is it perfect? No, but my vocal pattern has become more melodic and bright. There’s some words I need to work on to be happy. My lisp is very noticeable, but it might lend a needed cuteness. Practiced sentences are easy, but the biggest issue I have is maintaining the default position. It’s easy if I’m listening to myself, but if I get distracted or am multitasking, my larynx will drift back down, resulting in a lower pitch.
Also I’m not sure if this is correct, but it’s my intuition. My voice has been cracking sometimes. I think the reason it happens, is because the sudden jump between the lower larynx where the muscles are tighter, and the upper larynx where they’re looser. Because sometimes, when I fall into a low pitch, my voice cracks on certain words. AMABs are socialized to avoid this, by lowering their resonance and pitch to become more monotone, they don’t voice crack as often.
Been writing for a bit. I’ve got my therapy appointment in about 15 minutes. And I’m nervous. I’m dressed for work, so I’m not currently presenting. I haven’t presented in front of anyone else yet. But when their office person called, they used my new name and fem pronouns to address me. It felt nice.
Anyway.
Squadala, I’m off
-Kat