BUDS

They call them buds.

It could have been me meandering down a little back country road between the store and my house when I noticed for the first time in my life an adult man lapping up in my body with his wide, hungry eyes. Or it could have been my best friend. Or a story or another girl, or a cousin. The road was narrow, his hairy arm hung out his car window, slowing his car to a lingering roll.

I kept my eyes on the ground in front of my feet and kept walking. Or she did.

Behind the buds springing up on my chest — nothing more than widening dimples — my heart stuttered, my stomach flooded with nausea as he drove away.

My little burgeoning breasts were pulling me into a world I wasn’t ready for. What was this tacky thing he left on me? All my lightness and drifting dreams were caught in a web, some dark unseen thing that made me feel that somehow I had done something wrong just by walking.

I wanted to run backward in time, crawl into my mother’s lap, take back my wish for a training bra, take back the times I had secretly slipped on my older sister’s silk padded underwire laying flat on the laundry table.

I walked home dazed and afraid. Shut the door. I told no one — or she pretend as if nothing was different. Nothing had happened, had it?

This was my — our— initiation, silent, into the world of the male gaze. All girls feel it, the liminal threshold we stumble across, still children as our bodies begin to take form mimicking women, little sprigs of new life taking shape on the branch.

As I got older, The Gaze followed me everywhere — boys my age, adult men, even elderly men participated. They watched me. I watched them watching me.

Many beautiful things have been written and said about the female experience and about living within the instruction of this male gaze and existing intersectionally within patriarchal systems, and while I have my own personal experiences that match and parallel, ultimately the unconventional thing I have discovered is: energy.

All these power dynamics — all energy forms. The most neutral thing I can say about it is that it’s not mine.

I had learned to adapt, grow and blossom in world not at all concerned with the vitality of my energy form — I remained entirely focused, even when resisting it, on an energy form located outside of me.

At times, this could be fun. Real fun. It could make me feel powerful and in control. I could wear the shapely thing, move in slinky or bouncy ways, or use my eyes to communicate things that could make them do dumb, silly, or conversely loving things. Things that made me feel important. Sexy. Wanted. Cared for. Competitive. Beautiful.

Other times it was terrifying. It followed me around into spaces where there were no men, a threat lingered nonetheless.

Other times it was merely exhausting. Everywhere. Unrelenting.

Sometimes it was erotic and exciting, like when it came to school dances as we freaked on the dance floor, grinding thigh to thigh as I pretended not to notice his erection rubbing on my leg. I held onto his sweaty white crew neck with one arm, aglow in the black light, the other arm swaying loosely to the beat like I had it all handled — and watched as the other boys watched.

Its power was like a hurricane. In the eye of the storm, I found transient moments of peace and exquisite unawareness — lulled off in my own internal world of creativity, athletics, studies or friendships — only to be abruptly pulled back into a vortex of The Gaze with a remark, a touch, a vibe, a reprimand. It had velocity.

It infiltrated into the spaces between my interactions with men, seeping into my dynamics with women of all ages and my own thoughts and behaviors where men were not even present.

This energy was everywhere, in everything – and I cared.

Every dressing room. Each hair cut. The scale, my outfit, my face — were my boobs big enough? Lips juicy enough? Did I smell right? Did I stand straight? Was I easy enough? Too loud? Too gross? Too opinionated? Too slutty? Not slutty enough? Was I sweet? Easy going enough? Did I make life seem fun?

Maybe I should be more like her? Or her? Or her? Or her? Or her? Or her? Or her?

Some days the attention felt like a burden and other days, currency. I knew it opened doors for me, literally and figuratively, and ushered in favors and kindnesses.

If I played by the rules, flirted, and made men feel good — the world was my oyster (sort of). The boys down at the tire shop might move my job to the front of the line and throw in a free rotation.

But this currency flowed both ways, sometimes I paid big. Like being forced to quit my job at 17 because I was being sexually harassed by a 64 year old supervisor, and no one believed me or cared.

Or in college, a well-meaning professor who I respected listened to me after class as I shared my tender dream to become a midwife — I was already studying with a doula in my spare time. He told me I should be a doctor because midwives have no real power. I spent the next few months looking into becoming a doctor. Except I didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to be a midwife. Then I gave up on all of it.

Or (fill in the blank horror story) because all women have them.

The world stood on an axis of what men thought of me — of us. What did men want? What did they find attractive and appealing? The everyone seemed to be paying attention to them and their proclivities, not at all curious about who I was.

After decades of this programming — all this energy focused on the outside — it no longer mattered if it was about sex or appearances or beauty or achievement. It wasn’t about men, even. The Gaze was an energy form that had me hunting for my worth outside myself, looking for it endlessly like a treasure, seeking validation in products, jobs, relationships, metrics, followers — anything except my own soulfulness. It was obscuring my own energy.

Who I was had to first pass through a sieve — only the parts that pleased, that didn't threaten, that fit neatly into outside ideas of acceptableness could make it through. The rest of me, the wild parts, the erratic truths, the edges that didn't smooth down nicely, got filtered out and lost. The sweet parts too, the succulent bits that didn’t want to get jaded in sexual exchanges, that wanted to stay earnest and eager, to remain innocent and gullible and naive — where was she to reside?

It was becoming hard to locate what was me. I was finely tuned to the energetic needs of the male world and all its weird complexities and bylaws — some good, some bad, some hot, some intoxicating, some disturbing — but the surface area of my own energy field was collapsing in around me.

One day, in my mid-thirties, The Gaze and I had our final encounter in the street.

I was walking from my shop to the mailbox at the corner, the taunt of a thick male voice followed behind me:

“Hey girl, you got a man? I hope not. That ass. Girl. I got what you need. Umm, yeah, girl… I sure do. He isn’t treating you right, I can tell. Why don’t you let me take care of you, he won’t have to know…”

I kept walking to the mailbox, unthreatened — opened the handle and slipped my letter in.

I spun around, revealing to my cat-caller a seven-month pregnant baby-bump.

Immediately he gushed, his pitch sliding up into atonement:

“Oh ma’am, I am so sorry. I didn’t realize. My apologies. I am so sorry — please forgive me ma’am.”

“Ok.” I walked back to my shop.

I laughed: How quickly a big-assed little slut like me could transform into a ma’am! One minute we’re about to have a goddamn affair, the next I am a ma’am?!

I relayed the story to the other women in my shop, we all guffawed as I repeated, “Ma’am!” while rubbing my big belly in an exaggerated stance, but I knew something monumental had shifted. Never, not once, had a cat-caller ever repented. That is not how they roll. Their whole shtick is power. That is the game.

As we laughed, a heaviness anchored down into the soles of my feet, an old anger as I realized that the only reason he relinquished was because I had been claimed by another man, impregnated and turned into a mother. Fuck it - who cares? I thought, as I pushed the anger down, laughing some more. My days of being under The Gaze were coming to an end, and I was relieved. It wasn’t exactly a victory, but at least I would have reprieve.

Or so I thought.

I was right that The Gaze on the street had ended. I was now invisible to men, fully cloaked in the armor of motherhood — a mixture of children nearby, overstretched clothing stained with breastmilk, and a fog of exhaustion that clung to my skin and to the edges of even my brightest smile.

I didn’t miss it, the way some women say they do — the validation something they come to secretly depend upon — I enjoyed going for a walk and feeling like a nobody. I liked feeling safer. I enjoyed feeling invisible.

After having my second baby girl, I decided to reclaim something I'd lost along the way. I met a new singing coach. My first singing teacher was off doing big things. Life had moved along while my voice sat idle for the few years I was pregnant and nursing my two daughters. I was ready to start singing again, but I was nervous I had lost much of the progress I had made.

My new teacher asked me to bring in some vocalists I admired. I made a playlist of singers and I brought them to our first session. We listened together in her living room — I sat on a folding chair, her slim frame behind the keyboard.

She leaned back: “Ok, interesting. You’re something. Most people come in here with a bunch of polished voices, you know, they want to sing like Ariana Grande or Mariah Carey. Or even Billie Eilish. But you have a lot of unusual, unique voices with emotional qualities and almost strange characteristics. Weird voices. This is awesome.”

I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I just picked out singers and songs I liked.

She ran through a few of the tracks and highlighted some of the vocal moments that stood out to her — a growl, a moan, a cry, a yodel, a mumble, a gravelly onset, vocal fry — and I nodded. “This is quite a different goal than doing intricate runs, you see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I see what you mean.”

We got to work, meeting once a week, and that is when The Gaze re-emerged.

Mid-song she would interrupt me and say — “Stop trying to be pretty.”

I’d pause in my tracks. She’d look at me.

“You’re trying to be pretty. Stop.”

If I wasn’t hitting the note, if I was getting pitchy and unstable, unable to find my way through the phrasing — we learned, together, that it was usually the same problem.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t hit notes, or that I was tone deaf or singing in the wrong key.

It was that I was afraid to sound ugly or weird.

I was trying to sound nice. Pretty. Pleasing. I wanted to have a “good” voice. I wanted to qualify, I wanted there to be no confusion about whether I belonged or deserved to sing. I was defaulting back into the old way — only certain types of women are allowed to be heard and seen and taken seriously, and that woman must be pretty, first and foremost.

I was terrified of making a sound that felt ugly or weird or strange and would instead push it to sound pretty, even when the moment didn’t call for pretty, even when the emotion wasn’t pretty, even when my influences weren’t pretty, even when there was no incentive whatsoever to be pretty — except a lifetime of programming that told me it was inherently dangerous not to be.

She would look at me, a dare in her eyes, and ask me to do the harder thing.

Tell the truth.

What do you want to say?

What does this song mean?

What do you feel?

Not what do you think you should feel, or what would be palatable.

What is the truth?

One day we were working on Lucinda William’s Fruits of My Labor. The final verse has a lyric that goes

Baby, sweet baby if it's all the same

Take the glory any day over the fame

Each time I came to this section I would clench up and want to cry. I wasn’t sure why I felt like crying — I had no emotional resonance with the word fame.

To get through it, I would try to sing up over that cry feeling, a push that would get flat or pitchy, or overly saccharine like I had taken all the actual sweet meaning and swapped it out for a sugar substitute. It was cloying.

She insisted I stop and pay attention. “Why is this part making you want to tear up?”

I slowed down. Took a breath.

“I don’t know. The word fame means nothing to me.”

“Maybe fame means something else to you, here, in this song.”

I looked again. I paid attention. We talked it out.

I realized this line is the song — it is the core, original, deep down regret of the narrator’s heartbreak.

She made a choice, but she made the wrong choice — a love story gone wrong.

She chose fame over glory.

The rest of the song is just her describing the sorrow that came out of this pinnacle moment she botched.

Tears welled in my eyes. Now I understood why I was choking up every time I got near this line.

I, too, had regret of this flavor. A true love I had let go in order to pursue all the “right” things in life.

She looked to me as I wiped my face: “Please, let it sound ugly at first. We can clean it up later, you know how to do that. First, make it as messy as you can. Let your voice feel the feeling.”

I tried singing it again.

I let my heart ache through the words, I allowed my voice to sound out the feeling — to trace the outlines of my own lament, the glory I had left behind and might never get back.

At first, my voice was tentative, like a needle trying to be threaded through the eye with an unskilled hand. She quietly listened as I cycled over the lyrics over and over, the sounds spooling out in front of me, my heart finding its way lower and steadier.

Goddamn it! I had done all the things: I had been a good girl, a good wife, a good mother. Why then was I exhausted, sad, having chronic migraines, stagnant, and angry all the time?

My eyes clenched tighter as the raw and wretched sounds percolated in my throat — I began voicing sounds for the countless times I had abandoned myself for the “fame”, the allure of the outside thing that promised to quench my thirst but only left a salty taste in my mouth.

Guttural, gross sounds stretched across my larynx and tongue — for all the times this energy form teased me and humiliated me, each time I preemptively betrayed myself to hide from it, had fallen in line to abide by its rules, by-stood injustice, participated, lost the thread all together.

Blubbering tones of sadness and grief reverberated — all the years traded — the endless ways this energy form had distracted me. Every lover who I thought was the answer and the countless hours I dedicated to making myself into the right type of woman. The diets, the to-do lists, the jobs that circumvented my gifts, the self-help books piled up on the shelf, the money handed over to therapists who told me how to communicate in his love language, the people I hurt and dragged into my misguided attempts to find the answers outside myself.

The time I could have been pouring into my own creativity. The time I could have been loving and knowing myself — this one short life to get to know this incredible, glorious being that is me. I sang out:

Take the glory any day over the fame

It may not have been pretty, but it was electric.

It was there all along, within myself, a bud.

see full article with links to vocal heroines who influenced my singing here >