"obliterate your perceived limitations"

notes from singing lessons

Three lessons in, my voice teacher can tell when I’m holding myself back.

“There was a look of mild panic on your face,” he says after he unintentionally surprises me with a new vocal warmup. Caught in an act I didn’t even know I was doing, I laugh and laugh. It’s funny, perhaps, how clear my expressions are. Growing up I used to practice my facial expressions in the mirror, worried that my eyes weren’t big enough to portray emotions convincing enough for the movies I wanted to be in someday. Wherever that insecurity came from.

People tend to put me on alto, I explained to my voice teacher, who replied that it made sense, perhaps given the lower timbre of my speaking voice. Groups often need strong voices on altos. Especially because I can sight read harmonies and rhythms pretty well. But you can totally hit Elphaba notes. He plays a little trill on the piano, her “Defying Gravity” run. Yeah, you can totally do that. He tells me he loved my audition, a phone video I had emailed the Shen program, a rendition of “Not a Day Goes By” from my favorite musical, Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. He says it so enthusiastically I, in retrospect, initially filed it away as him simply being nice.

“What note do you think that was?” asks my voice teacher after an ascending exercise. “What note do you think of as being difficult, belting wise?”

“Like, I imagine an E and above as very hard,” I reply.

“And those are hard notes.” He plays the note I just sang. “That was an F. And you could have gone higher. We just stopped because—while we get you out of your own way.”

As I get more comfortable, I speak more honestly. Like after a warmup that sounds markedly louder, and surprisingly stable, after some support adjustments, I admit, “I was holding back because I was afraid of sounding ugly.”

“I knew it! I knew it.”

The last, and only, time I took voice lessons was for one month the summer before I went to college. I was sixteen years old, and my goal was to develop a blended voice for my higher register. I wanted to sound stronger past that pesky A/B barrier where my voice kept cracking from chest into head. By the end of the month, my goal was met. I went to college wielding a mixed register that gave me the confidence to try my hand at the student theatre community. No voice breaks, no unexpected cracks. Few hardcore belts, if any, but at the very least, I could rely on my voice sounding pretty, stable, and consistent. It wouldn’t betray me.

I sent in an audition tape for the Shen Curriculum, the musical theatre program at Yale, at the beginning of September. It was one of two things I went for this fall. After a long day of meetings in late August, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to follow through on the audition slot I had signed up for with the Yale grad student acapella group. (I followed through.) The following week, the Shen deadline approached. My head built it up and up and up into a colossal thing. It had been a while since I wanted something, with even a semblance of the ardency that used to keep me up sleepless on nights before auditions and premieres and performances, and even the kind of frenzy that had pushed me through writing papers and poems and stories. Caring that much about something. Forgetting about your own body, eating and sleeping, because of it. I was getting too aware of my body’s every fluctuation. At the beginning of the summer, I’d put on a dress, and it had fit, it had just fit different. I was thinking too much about that. I wanted to feel like there was more to life than maintenance. I wanted to feel it again as much as I was afraid of getting terribly disappointed for it.

I waffled back and forth. I swam in my feelings. I could stay here, I thought, in my room, and never find out. If I stayed here, I would know what to expect, which was the same, same. The same feelings. Some pockets of peace, some quiet. And also, the same hurt, the same pain. The same longings. It wouldn’t change.

If you don’t do anything, then nothing will definitely change.

Doing nothing is also a choice. So I started moving. Somewhere, somehow.

Two weeks ago, I turned 25. I’ve been writing online for years now (more if you count pseudonymized fanfiction and roleplay days—and short-lived YouTube singing covers), and more than that, I’ve been interacting with people for all this time. I am raw from the regret of fearing that I have been too vulnerable, that I have been compromised, and that it was my doing. In life, in writing. On this platform, too. Singing again—rigorously, seriously, exhilaratedly—author’s note: it feels so good to be in the craft of singing again!—is one vessel through which these fears and inhibitions are exposing themselves. I don’t think there’s a rational explanation for courage. It’s just something one tries on, or not. It’s a choice and it’s also not. How do you choose what you don’t know will happen?

Maybe it says something about me that I keep moving. That there is always a part of me that goes, why the hell not. In order for these lessons to make a difference, I have to be open to take risks. To change.

I didn’t know I could belt that high note in my chest voice. Yet somehow I do. I try. I let my voice go. And the surprise and the elation is written all over my face after it happens.

When we’re singing, says my voice teacher, “we’re working on allowing ourselves to be revealed in public.”

I can see the outside of College Street through the window I face when I’m singing during my lessons in Stoeckel Hall. Sometimes passersby do a double-take; sometimes, they are people I know. Out of curiosity, after my third lesson I circle around to the front of Stoeckel to get a look for myself. The view to the inside of the practice room is clear and unobstructed.

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I’ve been mustering the courage to write. It’s October and we’re entering the gentle prodding of the part of the PhD that goes, “your-exams-are-coming-and-you-can-do-this-but-in-order-for-anything-to-happen-you’ve-got-to-start-saying-something.”

When I hear myself talking, I imagine my words weaving in and out and between the objects of concern in a discursive shape that exhibits an eloquent proficiency at composition. It’s different from bullshitting; it physically pains me to bullshit. It’s because I try so hard to mean everything I say that these verbal gymnastics perhaps spiral at times. Because at the same time that I don’t want to lie, I don’t want to be caught saying something that isn’t ready yet. And I don’t want to give my trust over to a listener who will step on it. The world is a real and disappointing place. Trust no one.

Lately in recalling these conversations—as I work on overcoming them—I imagine the figurative manifestation of my discursive tactics a kind of intellectual fugitive, evading capture, recognition. Evading identification. My reflex is to refuse to be pinned down. In meta-analyzing my own rhetorical safety mechanisms, I’ve been picturing scenes from Avatar: The Last Airbender of Aang airbending from his attacker(s), dodging and ducking and twisting, frustrating the hell out of them because they can barely keep track of him, they can’t find him, they can’t attack him and he won’t attack them.

“Your mind is like a sprite,” a friend said to me recently. There’s an ingenuity to the logic of a sprite, and a kind of flightiness associated with it too. Flitting in and out and between thoughts, making connections between seemingly disparate things. Ingenious, perhaps. And elusive.

Perhaps I have developed a deft way of building structures out of my words, so that people pay attention to them rather than to me. That they see intentional constructions of my making and take them to be me. Or something like that. “You’re an interesting character, Karis Ryu,” says one of my advisors. I think I’d been wanting to hear that. Not just that I am more than the labels I could be typified as, but that I am a logic, a system in my own right, and people respect its order and complexity. “What does Karis Ryu think about religion? How does Karis Ryu connect myth, race, and colonialism? Why is the concept of worldbuilding important to Karis Ryu?”

How do you choose what you don’t know will happen? What you can’t know? When I compiled my exam lists in the spring, I was jigsawing together a kind of Frankenstein’s monster (four sets of them) without even knowing the precise content of its anatomical parts. This is the ritual of the PhD exams, I’m learning, alongside my cohort. I won’t know where it will take me until I’m done. And when I finish this, I’ll be a stronger person for it. Knowing what you want is a skill. I’ve been honing it, I have.

I entirely reorganize one of my exam lists and send it to my advisor. Before I lose steam, I start writing some thoughts. “As I’ve been reflecting on why I wanted to make a list on Aesthetics, Affect, and Embodiment, I realized I’m interested in tracing the genealogy of ‘normative’ and ‘nonnormative’ bodies, and how that affects dynamics of intimacy and relation. So I’ve shifted the organization from thematic categories to (still somewhat thematic but) chronological ones. The first section is thus composed of texts that study the biopolitics of constructing the normative body (synonymous with the Victorian body??) during the nineteenth century. Through race, ability/disability, and the senses. I’ve framed the next set of texts as explorations of subject formation in the imperialist context of the twentieth century. Particularly Cold War aesthetics, an emphasis on Asian racialization, what militarism does to conceptions and processes of racialization and nationhood, as empire is trying to understand—that is, comprehend and conquer—what it is pinning down as the Pacific theater and the subjects within it. The third section is basically about the dehumanizing, disembodying effects of late capitalism. Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant. And the final section is composed of interdisciplinary and poetic ‘responses’ to these categorizations by authors and artists who queer the notion that these boundaries are supposed to be and feel natural.”

It was taught and reinforced, growing up, that my life wasn’t my own. That does something to a person.

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The essay version of Eve Sedgwick’s “A Dialogue on Love” ends with her observing her male therapist, facing their difference. Hiding herself.

“Even if he is thinking, he’s alert to his surroundings. When he gets near the bottom of the shrubby border, suddenly the balloon makes a graceful, low dip: I see him gather up from the pavement the clumps of pine mulch I kicked down as I was teetering on the brink. Then bobbing up gently, he pats it back into place, his hands briefly smoothing it in with the other mulch.

Me hanging back, wanting not to be seen.”

You know what/who to trust based on the proximity of familiarity, seems to be the reflex of social reification. The logic keeps people in the same places. Difference, in return, is not a perfectly meted distribution of palatable novelty. Surprise is surprising in ways you cannot anticipate comprehension of. You have to be willing to experience it.

I’ve stopped avoiding regret. That is, I acknowledge when it’s there. My regrets about the past, past communities and past selves, my regrets about things I had no control over and some things I might have had some part in. Both realities can be true. Regret generates from the things you couldn’t have known at the time, as though you could have. I get to be here, now, writing about them. “In the choose-your-own-adventure multiverse of it all,” I say to the people I get to call my colleagues and my friends, “I’m glad to be in this version of it.”

That there are no right or wrong decisions

That to be understood is a fallacy

To let go