The summer after my junior year, about nine months into my relationship with Conspiracy, I stayed in New Haven instead of going home to Detroit. The most life-affirming thing I did that summer was travel to New York City for a weekend workshop with Silky Voice, my first real acting teacher.
Silky Voice taught Yale's beginning acting class, which I took sophomore year. She was a tiny woman who simultaneously terrified and electrified me. She told me that I was a neurotic mess who needed therapy. She suggested that I start taking yoga, because my unnaturally high tension level was getting in the way of true emotional expression. She assigned me great scene-study roles, based on emotional depth, not skin color.
A year later, she was the person I turned to for advice. When I was angry or sad or under stress, my throat would physically constrict to the point that I couldn't speak. Did she know of anything I could do?
It turned out that in a matter of weeks, she was holding a voice workshop in New York City called, "Finding Your True Voice." I signed up, and with Conspiracy's blessing, spent a weekend in the big city, with real actors, in a real acting studio.
The class involved a lot of deep breathing, body work, vocal exercises and deeply personal monologues. Silky Voice was still every bit as terrifying and electrifying as I remembered. She admonished me to "avoid the continual sobbing" that had marked my first year of acting. She made a cutting comment about me living with an old man. In response to some Conspiracy-inspired comment I made, she cackled, "Ha ha! She's paranoid!"
During one exercise, my breath caught and my chest constricted and I began to cry. Silky Voice used me as an example: "You see that? That's early childhood, like maybe seven or eight."
At another point, she turned to the group and said, "You see how strong she is? She has the capacity to play heroines like Joan of Arc, and her strength scares her out of her mind."
She was right. Me, strong? Me, heroic? I had no idea what she was seeing. I felt sad, lost, powerless, frail, pathetic and out of control.
But on the final day of the workshop, a breakthrough.
A moment where my true voice came ringing out, crystal clear, no constriction, no muffling. Even more startling, in that instant, my vision became noticeably sharper.
It was a moment that changed my life.
I returned to Conspiracy drained, energized, relaxed and empowered, all at the same time.
That night, we made love, and it was different.
The difference was me. Normally, I react quite loudly to passionate events ... but this time, I was quiet. Not a deliberate choice, and not that I was faking before. Just that I didn't feel the need to cry out.
Conspiracy was confused, and he made a biting comment about not liking whatever "they" had done to me in New York.
But I knew that what had happened in New York was right. It was my first whiff of independence at a time when I didn't yet realize that I was completely under his control.
