To set the scene: Last weekend I lost my voice, and then on Monday I woke up feeling totally ill. Maybe it was change of seasons, maybe it was the typhoon, or, maybe it was just not taking a break since in months. Probably a mixture of all three.
Some things I have learned about losing your voice:
It wasn’t as big a deal as I felt: Nobody minded postponing, cancelling or facilitating my meetings. In big meetings that couldn’t be skipped, people were more attentive to chat than normal. So I typed. A lot.
Communicating without speaking is really hard: Trying to describe my symptoms to my doctor was really hard. I don’t think I realised how much of a crutch I have found speaking.
Talking is a big part of who I have become: I felt like I couldn’t really express myself, and I noticed that even my inner monologue was quieter.
OK so how do you spend a week where you’re not going out, and you can’t talk to anyone?
You pick up the todo item from 2022 to “Have a personal away day”, combine it with another todo item from 2019 to “Do a SWOT” and compile a 30-page printed document pack and book a closed space in a co-working space for Sunday.
You go through your inbox, spring-clean your newsletter & marketing subscriptions, and delete over a decade of emails.
You research and bid on auctions for a blender so that you can make your own peanut-butter and soups, instead of relying on the comparatively expensive store-bought versions you’ve been on since last year.
You update the Life/Travel in UK doc you’ve been sharing with friends/colleagues and add a section about Birmingham, and in doing so realise that Birmingham’s Chinatown is genuinely better than London’s one.
On the away-day: This was a major highlight (and much more useful than the past few years of unpublished yearnotes) but it is so deeply personal that I cannot really share anything other than that I answered some big questions and have prioritised (and deprioritised) some big things. My next one is booked for the end of the year, and if I can refine it I will share some resources + a write-up of what I did, because lacking this information is why it took me years to do.
I tried out Fable for the time we had it. It was alright. It spotted a genuine vulnerability with Webmentions in this blog which I had missed.
