THE VANISHING SELF

When 'who I am' disappears, what happens next?

THANK YOU to everyone preordered THE LOST VOICE, which comes out May 20th, 2025. Preordering is the #1 way to help debut authors get the book into more hands, as it signals to publishers that the book deserves more resources.

For those just tuning in, The Lost Voice is my memoir that grapples with the loss of my singing voice to spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice disorder with no known cure. Prior to the diagnosis, I’d been a professional singer for sixteen years in my projects The Hush Sound, Gold Motel, Springtime Carnivore, and as a touring member of Vampire Weekend.

One of the book’s core questions is: How do I rebuild my sense of identity when the thing that made me me has disappeared?

© Hollis Brown Thornton

No matter how lucky we are, all of us will inevitably lose a treasured aspect of our identity. Though it often occurs through loss—of relationships, loved ones, cherished places and landscapes, or physical abilities— even life's most joyful moments, such as childbirth or marriage, will bring identity shifts as we leave behind our former selves.

In the wake of the diagnosis, my reflexive response was a sunny-side-up, Midwestern approach: STAY POSITIVE AT ALL COSTS. I visualized a miraculous healing. I signed up for weekly speech therapy and practiced my exercises religiously. I did white light meditations. I did more detoxes than Gwyneth Paltrow.

Weeks became months and my voice missed the memo about a miraculous healing. My former four-octave powerhouse voice was reduced to a gravelly, buckling, tremor-ing voice that couldn’t hold a steady pitch. As I pushed my grief deeper down, it rose up in my dreams.

I woke up gasping from a dream that I had choked on a peach pit. In another, I stood center stage at Carnegie Hall and as I opened my mouth to sing, no words came out. I dreamt that I was boarding a flight at LAX and when the desk clerk asked for my ID, my photograph had disappeared from my passport. When the clerk offered to fingerprint me instead, I held up my hands and realized that even my fingerprints were gone.

© Marina Marcolin

Everyone has a self-concept — the beliefs and feelings and ideas about our own capacities, desires, and values. Our self-concept is the answer to the question, "Who am I?"

When we can no longer answer that question, we enter the dark, thorny forest of the unknown. We become wanderers. Even if we stay in familiar surroundings—the same house, the same relationships—we become internal wanderers, leaving behind the who we think we are to seek a deeper, more authentic self.

In that stage of lostness/wandering/uncertainty, there’s 1 rule: Trust your intuition. As the poet William Stafford says, you must be “prepared to follow even the most trivial hunch.” Your intuition is your only roadmap out of the dark.

I know a woman who spent years trying to heal her childhood sexual abuse through EMDR and somatic therapy but nothing alleviated her pain until, on a whim, she signed up for a tango class. Tango required her to learn a vulnerability she'd long suppressed – allowing another person to hold her. Falling in love with the dance was how she re-learned to trust the other again. But that first tango class? She was following ‘the most trivial hunch.’

My hunch was to be in silence and in wilderness. I spent months in Utah where the desolate, barren canyons mirrored my own ravaged heart.

Grand Staircase Monument in Escalante, Utah

I started asking the powers that be, “Well, what do you want me to do now?” One answer: read about other artists who’d lost their gifts.

In Mark Matousek’s book, When You’re Falling, Dive, I discovered the story of John Dugdale, a photographer who had lost his sight because of a stroke and retinitis and felt so hopeless that he came close to ending his life in the aftermath. Eventually, John figured out how to use a large-format camera and an assistant to make work as the world’s first blind photographer.

Before his illness, he was a successful commercial photographer, but his work lacked a distinct artistic style. After he lost his sight, the images he created were deep and evocative, pulling me into them like dreamworlds—ethereal portraits of people and places, images inspired by deep memory and personal longing, captured in blue-tinted cyanotype and platinum prints:

© John Dugdale

Those stunning images wouldn’t have existed if not for his illness. According to Dugdale, vision is not the same thing as sight. Perhaps voice is not the same thing as singing.

I also read about how the spiritual teacher Ram Dass faced profound physical limitations after a stroke later in life. In his book on conscious aging, he wrote 'Healing is not the same as curing, after all; healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.’

I turned that into a Mad Lib in which I could replace “God” with other options:

'Healing is not the same as curing, after all; healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move me closer to my creativity, my compassion, my sense of aliveness.”

After a year spent wandering and thrashing around in my own pain, I redefined my voice as any expression of my heart.

By that new definition, my creativity became boundless. The way I braided my nieces’ hair became my voice. The way I cooked a meal became my voice. When I wrote a dirty joke on a postcard and mailed it to a friend, that became my voice.

I celebrated my 33rd birthday alone in Utah, sitting beside the Colorado river. I drank coffee and lit a candle on a tiny health-food cake, and I surrendered. I said to the river, “If you’re actually taking my voice, give me something that feels as good as singing. Make this a fair trade.”

Soon, the writing on the page came. Soon, hundreds of thousands of words.

As I traced the discovery, cultivation, and loss of my singing voice, I saw my life story with new eyes:

Why did I spend most of my career trying to sound like other singers, instead of treasuring my own voice while I had it?

How was I confident enough to sing for 20,000 people, yet not confident enough to speak my truth in love relationships or to stand up to a bully?

If my voice was really gone, then how would I rebuild a sense of identity? How would I show up in the world next? The more I wrote, the more hope and meaning I found.

Soon, this book came and answered those questions. Prior to losing my singing voice, I never would’ve have considered myself worthy of filling 276 pages of my stories and truths. Thankfully, life knew better. I can’t wait for you to read The Lost Voice.

Big love,
Greta

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P.S. Goodreads is offering a giveaway of 10 ADVANCE READER COPIES of the book. You can enter here to win one before MARCH 2nd. These are advanced copies called galleys, which are TOP SECRET early printings of the book that are not available to the public.