Finding your voice

One of the reasons I have been resistant to social media is my fundamental inability to separate my life into different compartments. I wear many different hats: a work hat, which centres upon museums, and thinking about them through my doctoral thesis; a play hat, which most often involves singing; and a Mummy hat, which occupies every other waking moment and then some. And I'm conscious that if I tweet extensively about a conference, I'm likely to gain some followers who will then be incredibly bored by updates about my next choir concert and who probably couldn't care less that we took a family trip to the zoo this weekend. I'm far too lazy (or, as I'd characterise it, busy) to set up separate Twitter accounts for each part of my persona. So, then, when thinking about making some first steps into the blogosphere, I encountered a conundrum: who to be? Which one to privilege, if any?

But perhaps I have been underestimating the potential for these different parts of my life to inform each other. For, after all, they all go up to make - well, me. And thinking about it, there are mutual influences. One of the most challenging things for me with regard to singing is to trust in my voice: to allow my breath to flow without constricting it and to let the sound be my sound, confident in the capacity of the air in my body to support this. In my PhD thesis, finding my voice has also been one of the most significant and difficult things that my supervisor has asked me to do. I am fully used to arguing for either side with regard to the academic literature - but, in the case of my doctoral research, what do I really want to say? And do I have the confidence to say it?

Ultimately, then, it all boils down to confidence and support. If I support my singing voice and relax, I will be able to sing with confidence and my voice, amongst many in my choir, will make its own sound. If I support my arguments and stay true to what I want to say I might get through the process of researching and writing a PhD. It's likely that, in this blog, I will mostly write about my professional life within the museum world, as that's where I am most confident and where I feel that my thoughts might make a contribution to debate, however small. But other parts of my life may well creep in, now and again. And whichever element I focus on, through all of this, I will have found what my own unique contribution - to a choir, to the museum world or to academia - is. And that's my voice.