Forty, and the mouth I used to hide

Ana with 1 N Author

I spent years learning how to make my mouth smaller. This is the year I stopped.

Forty, and the mouth I used to hide

At eight I sang with my mouth wide open, not thinking once about how it looked. My grandfather used to laugh about being old the same way, wide open, no apology in it. He shared my birthday and lived past a hundred laughing like that.

Somewhere between eight and here, I stopped opening my mouth the same way.

The years that felt incomplete

I arrived in this country nine years ago speaking almost no English. For a long time there was a hollow feeling I didn't have a name for, no music yet, no writing, nothing I could point to and call mine. I filled it with courses, certifications, things to be good at, face yoga, business, whatever I could learn my way into. None of it touched the actual hollow.

The music came later. The aerial came later. The writing came later. All of it arrived only once I stopped trying to fill the feeling and started sitting inside it instead.

The mouth I closed as a child

Somewhere after eight, I started closing my mouth, slowly, without noticing it happening. Children can be cruel about the way you speak, and so can adults, and I heard enough of it that I learned to keep my voice smaller. Someone once told me I sang badly. I believed it.

What I was really protecting wasn't my voice.

What changed

This year I started singing lessons. I started aerial properly again, and something in my body remembered how to hold weight. I began speech therapy, going after the jaw tension that has always made certain sounds hard for me, even the ones I still struggle to hear. None of it happened because I decided to fix myself. It happened because I got tired of being smaller than I am.

The comment that stung

Last week, out of nowhere, a young person told me, "you look like 40s." I asked why. They said I had lines around my mouth like their grandmother.

I laughed about it after, mostly. It landed somewhere it shouldn't have, one of the old bruises about how I look that I still carry more than I'd like to admit at forty. I am doing the exercises anyway, and working on the tension underneath them. But that isn't really what this is about.

The photoshoot

For my birthday I gave myself a photoshoot, with Mariya, who has known me for years, which made it easier to be in front of a camera than it has ever been with a stranger. Even she kept noticing how tense I was through the session.

Looking at the photos after, I found the one where the asymmetry in my mouth is impossible to miss. The version of me that closed her mouth at eight would have asked for that photo to be deleted. I didn't.

Forty

I am building something I invented myself, that keeps connecting back to my own life in ways I never planned. I am writing a book about all of this. I know what I stand for now, spiritually and otherwise, without the doubt that used to sit underneath everything.

I spent years learning how to make my mouth smaller. At forty, I am finally leaving it open - to be seen, to be heard, to sing.

Categories: : MemoryinMotion