Pushkin.
Hey everyone, it's me Maya. Today we're bringing you an episode from Proxy, hosted by Joe Shah, who you might already know from NPRS in Visibilia. Proxy is built around a simple idea. Whatever you might be going through, no matter how specific or hard to explain, you're not alone. There is someone else out there somewhere who truly gets it. In each episode, Yoe connects her guests with someone they may have never met otherwise, but who understands something essential
about their experience. The intimate, searching conversations that follow feel right at home here. On a slight change of plans, the episode you're about to hear Katelyn Lost the Voice in her Head is about something I know all too well, what happens when you can't do the thing you love the most anymore, the thing you've built your whole life and identity around. I hope you enjoy it.
If you had to vocalize the sound of this conundrum, woa would it sound like?
It's that wind?
Hmmm? The wind outside your window?
Yeah?
Why wind?
It's not silence, but it's it's not saying anything.
Hello, prexy listeners, we are back. I'm the aishaw on proxy. We believe no one is ever alone with their problem, no matter how niche, no matter how weird, because statistically, somewhere out there is someone who gets it, and through the powers of reporting, we find them. In case you haven't heard the show, what we do is put these two people in conversation to see what they can learn from each other, and hopefully so we can have a
good but also awkward, but also beautiful time together. Today's case the writer who woke up one day with no words in our head. What do you do when the thing that gives your life meaning this appears. That's after the break. Last year, I got an email with a subject line that got my attention. It was just three words,
inner Narrator died. The email was from a woman named Kaitlyn Meyer, a poet, memorist, an essayist who had lived with the company of her inner narrator all her life until one day it disappeared, along with her ability to write. I imagine for a long time, when people ask you to introduce yourself in these kinds of interviews, would you say.
I'm a writer? But yeah, Over the last few years, I do feel this drop into the pit of my stomach when I say it, because it doesn't feel completely true.
Caitlyn is fifty seven with a septum piercing and boyish white hair. She looks cool. If I saw her in a line up, I'd be like, she's an artist. Caitlin told me she spent decades teaching herself how to write, learning to listen to the voice in her head, and then in her forties, she reorganized her entire life around that voice. She left her husband, she got rid of her apartment, went part time at her translation job, just enough for food, rent plane tickets, and she started wandering.
The intention was to go places she didn't know anyone, where she didn't speak the language, so she'd be forced to be alone and focus on her writing.
I'd stay for the length of a tourist visa wherever I went, and that was about the right amount of time, because I'd start to get sucked into a social scene and then it was time to go. Wow.
That is committing to the bit, structurally forcing herself into loneliness.
And it was wonderful because when I was partnered. Every time I was partnered with a man, they were jealous of the time that I spent writing. I had to steal time to write. I had to fit it in the corners of the day. I had to fight for the television to be off.
I started reading Caitlin's writing for the story, and it is really fucking good. She writes about escaping traditional womanhood in ways that don't feel preachy but make me feel like another way is possible, and she has a real gift with words that cut with such precision they hurt. There were moments reading I'd inhale sharply like I was
eating something spicy. And there was this one nonfiction essay she wrote about a former lover that felt like the wildest foreshadowing of what would one day happen to Caitlin. In the essay, her lover all so a writer and memorist, he suddenly loses his memory and forgets their entire relationship, and he asks Caitlin to write about what's happening to him because, as he says, I don't know if I'll get my brain back. And then just five years later,
Caitlin is settled in Portugal. She's coming out with her first traditionally published book, with her first book launch, her first big book review in the San Francisco Chronicle with a big photo.
But of course I was already working on the next book. It was already going to be better.
And one day Caitlin is walking up the hill to the place she likes to write, and her footland's funny on the path and she stumbles.
I wasn't even aware of having hit my head. What I do know is that I was like, oh, I just took a little tumble. I'm going to get up, and I couldn't get up because I was so dizzy.
It didn't seem like a big hit, but ended up with a concussion. Caitlin had had concussions before, so she knew the drill. She took it easy, avoided screens. But over the next few months the symptoms got worse. She kept getting tired and seasick. She couldn't balance very well, She had trouble finding words in conversation. She couldn't read, she couldn't write. She felt like an old lady all of a sudden.
But I didn't really realize that the inner narrator was gone for a while. I think I recall walking in the park and realizing that there were no words in my head, like none and I saw a goat and I had to like really crank to find the word for goat. I thought in images and feelings, but I didn't think in words anymore.
Caitlin eventually got a diagnosis for post concussion syndrome. She couldn't work, so her friends took her in and for the next three years, Caitlin went to doctor visit after doctor visit. She took long walks and did lots of rehab what her friends called visual torture, doing things like bouncing and catching balls, all while the voice in her head was silent.
In one sense, it was a real Buddhist being in the moment kind of experience, which in some ways was nice.
Why was it nice because I.
Also didn't have the voice telling me what I had to do. I didn't have the voice telling me that I was an impostor. It was nice to have that voice shut up.
Today, Caitlin's back to working part time at her translation job. She can talk, walk, read, and she can technically write again. She boasts short essays with lots of photos on Patreon, and she did write a poem the other week, but it didn't feel the same. After years of trying different techniques, typing without looking at the screen, voice dictation, writing by hand. She just misses her inner voice, her narrator.
My narrator before was they were non binary, by the way, and they would It was almost like a song. It was all about this sort of resonance inside my head. I could tell myself stories to fall asleep. I would just live in whatever I was writing at the time. And now I do think in words. But that writing voice, the storytelling voice, the poetic voice, the way that I always heard what I wrote, is still gone, and I don't really know how to write without it.
And this is why Caitlin came to us.
I would get up every morning and I would know what I was doing that day, and it was the thing I most wanted to do, and I was good at it and people wanted it. Now I really have to stretch to find a point. How do I move forward? How do I find the plot?
After the break? I find Caitlin a proxy, someone who also lost their voice. Kaitlyn, Hie, how are you doing?
I'm okay, I'm nervous, I'm excited.
Are there any updates that I should know about?
I mean, I'm just keeping on. I've painted a couple of things that I like.
So yeah, after the concussion, Caitlyn started painting. It's not our calling, per se, but she's really into it. Recently, she painted a dead goal that washed up on the beach near her house. I don't think I've ever seen a painting of a dead goal.
Well, I can send it to you.
Uh, okay, so the proxy is here, Okay, all right? Should I let them in? You ready?
Yes?
Yes?
So the proxy I knew.
I wanted to find an artist, someone who'd spent years mastering their craft, devoted their life to it, and then lost their ability to do the thing they loved, the thing that.
Gave them purpose.
And surprisingly I found options. There are unfortunately, way too many artists who've lost their ability to make their art. I found a painter, a few musicians, some dancers. I even found a writer who'd lost her ability to write in a freak health incident, but through years of hard work, got it back. But I thought, would it be painful for Caitlin to talk to our writer who could write again,
because she doesn't know if she ever will. And then I found someone who felt closer to the place Caitlin occupies, someone who also lost the thing that defined them, who built their her entire life around a voice and then lost it. Meet Greta Morgan. Hi, so nice to meet you, Caitlin. It's really good to meet you. Greta Greta Morgan is a songwriter, musician, and singer who wrote a memoir called The Lost Voice. She says before losing it, she worked her ass off to get her singing voice.
I was not a natural singer, so I didn't have a good pitch and I didn't have a lot of range, and I trained my voice really from nothing, because I just wanted so badly to share my songs with the world.
She's had quite the career. She's thirty eight now, but her first band got signed at seventeen. She skipped six weeks of senior year to go on an arena tour with Fallout Boy. Music was her livelihood, her social circle, her expression, her entire life.
And then when I was thirty, I joined the band Vam Pier Weekend, who was already hugely famous, and all of a sudden, I was like at the peak of my musical career, you know, headlining Madison Square Garden, playing right before the Cure, playing before Bob Dylan, like having all my musical bucket list dreams come true and working on a solo record that I hoped would be like the biggest swing I had ever taken creatively.
I listened to Greta's musical project Springtime Carnivore, and it became the soundtrack to writing this story. It racks Here's Face in the Moon from a record Midnight Room. And then in March of twenty twenty, Greta got COVID playing a festival in Florida at the covering from a terrible fever. She was then a vocal lesson when she discovered she couldn't access the top half of her singing voice. Here's a clip of her trying to sing that same song I just played you.
Co co to the dug Is anybody else? It just does not work if I'm trying about.
It. Took months to figure out what was happening, but eventually Greta got diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that involves involuntary spasms of the vocal chords.
So my singing voices, I knew it just was completely decimated. So not only could I not perform and have a livelihood. But I also couldn't realize express myself the way I'd always known for years, just my kind of emotional expression and my love of writing and playing. And now I'm six years into this journey, you know, hundreds of speech therapy sessions, vocal injections, holistic therapies, and at this point,
I've recovered maybe about forty percent of my voice. So when I heard your story, I was immediately like, I need to talk to her.
I'm having all the feelings like this happened to you in twenty twenty, this happened to me in twenty twenty. I'm like very emotional at this moment looking at your story from outside. It's like I can feel grief for what you went through in a way that I can't feel it for what I went through.
That's so interesting.
Greta tells Caitlin that this is also her first time talking to someone who's been through the same thing, and Caylen tells Greta.
Her situation getting to the point where I could call myself a writer was a big deal. How she also felt like she was summoning a peak with her writing, so it was really feeling like I was arriving into my authorial self.
How she also lost her ability to do the thing she loved.
A friend of mine who's a brain scientist, said that it was similar to a.
Stroke and how eventually, after years of rehab, she regained all her abilities, except her internal narrator never came back.
It was almost like singing or almost like music, and it was just gone.
Wow.
And writing really felt like that was my purpose in life. And without the voice, I feel like I lost my purpose. I feel like I don't know why I'm I don't know why I'm alive sometimes, or that's at its worst.
Yeah, I mean, I just feel that heartbreaks so viscerally. And the other thing that really caught me was when you were saying, not only were you having difficulty reading and writing, but you were having trouble walking. It feels like a huge, massive challenge and setback that happened in your life. I've had separate but alongside some of my vocal issues. Also, I was disabled for two years by long COVID, to the point where I had to move
home with my parents. But I just so relate to the immediate loss of ability and how shocking it is, and just how kind of scary it is.
After Caitlin realized she couldn't write, she threw herself, finding a new calling, a new artistic medium to be obsessed with, to be her thing.
When I was first going through this, I got really invested in the inspiration porn story. The Okay, I can't read, I can't write, so I'm gonna make a podcast. I'm going to teach myself how to make a podcast, and I'm going to do that. I thought that I could just quickly pivot and be amazing through just sheer force of will, and that's not how it works. I did. I did learn to paint. One weird benefit of whatever brain shit was going on was my experience of color
got heightened. So I have been learning to paint. And again with that idea that I was gonna pivot and change my story and woohoo, look how amazing. I was going to become a painter now and that was going to be my thing. But I don't feel that sense of calling that I had before.
Greta, did you encounter those kinds of stories?
I did, and all of those stories pissed me off. Yeah. Right after my diagnosis, my closest friends and family sent me all of these kind of loss and renewal inspiration stories. I mean, and you know they are beautiful stories that I can appreciate more now. At the time they all pissed me off. A couple examples would be like, you know, Julie Andrews lost her voice after a surgery, but she started writing children's books with her daughter, and that's how
her voice will speak to a new generation. I was like, Okay, yeah, that's beautiful, but like, what was Julie Andrews doing the two weeks after she realized she couldn't sing? Like that was what I wanted, not this kind of tidy, tied up with a bow story because I was just I felt so just kind of ravaged and torn open.
Yeah.
I think rushing too soon, you know, the inspiration porn element, like the rushing too soon, it never works. A friend of mine was saying, you can't write about the plane crash while you're on the plane crash. There's an element of when you're in a process that's really painful and there's a dissolution that's happening, It's almost like the dissolution has to finish the entire process before the new thing can start to be born, and rushing it can kill that experience.
Greta, what did that dissolution process look like for you?
For me, the dissolution process looked like spending months just wandering around in the Southwest and unburdening myself of so many the things that I had. I mean, my physical possessions all had to be thrown out basically because the house I was living in I found out I had to move out suddenly it was full of mold. So it was like I was immediately unburdened of my physical possessions and my clothes, my books, my bed.
You know.
Then I kind of had to let go of my career and my professional life and admit that I had to focus on my body and focus on my health. And by leaving Los Angeles, I let go of a certain amount of my social experience. It really just felt like these layers of what I had and what I loved were just kind of being peeled away, one by
one by one. I had an experience here in the Catskills a couple of years ago where I saw a deer had been killed on the road and it had been pushed to the side of the river, and it was a place where I walked almost every day, and over the course of four days, I saw this deer go from a full animal to being just a piece of a spine. And there was a way where it felt like my life got peeled down to just the bones. Just like here I am. I'm a body, and I'm consciousness.
And the way that I witness and engage with the world around me, that's who I am now, Like it's not what I got paid to do. It's not even what I love doing. It's not who people think I am. It is my experience right now of being a witness to what is directly in front of me in this moment.
Was there a moment when you realized that you had to kind of let go?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. My friend Christopher sent me this series of talks by Francis Weller, who's a grief psychologist, and when he first sent them to me again, I was kind of pissed off, Like I was like, I don't need these I don't need to grieve because my voice is just going to come back. My voice will heal, and why would I waste my time grieving if I'm
gonna like have a miraculous healing or whatever. But then I had enough ups and downs and I was kind of recognizing, I don't think it's coming back the way that it was. No matter what I do, no matter how much of this like mind over matter, miraculous healing energy I'm trying to work with, my voice was just not coming back. And I finally listened to these tapes while I was walking in Escalante one day, and firstly, when Francis Weller started talking, I could hear he had
an issue with his voice. He said, oh, he had a poll up on his vocal cords, and I immediately was like, okay, I like this person. And he was talking about the kind of sacred connection between grief and aliveness, and he says that grief and aliveness are like sisters. And I had always been so scared of grief because my best friend committed suicide when I was in high school. My great grandmother had been, you know, put into an
insane asylum essentially for grief. My relationship with grief is like if you touch it, it will pull you under it and you will never come up. And so I was always very resistant to actually grieving what I had lost, But on the flip side of that, I kept diminishing my own pain, which you can't process your own pain if you're diminishing it. When I would say to myself, well, I'm so lucky I got to be a musician. What
a gift that I got to do that? Yeah, or like, well, I'm at least I'm not living in a war torn place right now. You know, I have my safety and that's all, you know. I would do these things, which, yeah, sometimes it's good to see the silver lining, but at the same time, I had this very real grief that was like a stone in my throat and I was not swallowing it and I was not addressing it, and like,
I couldn't process it. So once I started just consciously grieving, I was thinking things in my head like I am grieving the fact that I have not been able to sing for nine months, or I am grieving the fact that I may never play a show again, or I am grieving the fact that I worked my whole life to train and build my voice and it was gone basically overnight.
What was that thing you said again that grief is, Oh, it's like brings you into contact with being alive.
There's a sacred link between grief and aliveness.
Oh God, that's great.
Oh and I really when I started working with the things that he was saying, they really changed me. One thing he said, he quotes James Hillman, who's the father of archetypal psychology, and the quote is something like, so often we try to work on the wound, but really the wound is trying to work on us. Like we go to therapy to try to fix the wound, but
the wound is actually trying to fix us. And so at that point I started asking myself like, Okay, what could this vocal laws be trying to fix in me? And once I started thinking about that, I realized like even when I had had my perfect voice forever and ever, you know, like I was so hard on myself, Like I had this incredible self criticism, nothing was ever good enough for me. And and also I was really in this kind of keeping up with the Joneses artistic professional
status world. I really place so much of my self worth on my professional accomplishments. So as I started looking at, well, what's this trying to heal in me? I was like, Okay, well, I think this is about self love, and I think this is about appreciating what I have with my voice. I think it's about stepping out of who people think I should be and becoming more of who I actually am or who I want to be.
I think those of us who were raised as girls and women are trained to look happy and not dwell on. We don't want to be a downer. Nobody wants to be Debbie downer, but especially Utah. I grew up Mormon, there's very much happy facade. And I had to really crank down my Utah smile when I started traveling, because in a lot of parts in the world, people just think you're nuts but huge, huge smile. But I really did. I still want to sort of protect other people from
knowing how deeply I'm feeling this. And I had friends who took me in because I couldn't work anymore. They were afraid that I was going to fall down my stairs in my house, so I moved in to what had been the maid's room off the kitchen with my friends and their two kids, and I really did feel like around them I had to present as Okay, I'm doing the work, I'm going to get better, I'm going to get out of your hair. So I guess I'm saying I hear you.
Yeah, I really relate to that. Yeah, wanting to perform like you're helping me, and I appreciate your help. So I'm going to go ahead and heal myself real quick. Don't worry about it.
When we return into the wilderness. Welcome back to the show. So one of Caitlin's biggest questions has to do with purpose, how to find a new calling when you can't do the thing you feel like you are put on earth to do. And Greta told Caitlin a story about a realization she had after reading a book by this guy, Bill Platkin called Soulcraft. The book is all about going on wilderness fasts to find the deepest possible gift your soul is meant to bring into this world, the thing
beneath being a writer, beneath being a singer. And so that's what Greta did. She does not recommend anyone try this without serious preparation and safety precautions, but she hiked down a canyon in Bear's Ears National Park with a friend and fasted for three days in the blazing sun and managed to have a vision without psychedelics.
People can roll their eyes at me. That's totally fine.
Yeah.
But I had this experience on the trip where I just got this sense I saw this image essentially of like a mirror, like I realized it was my It was just sort of my job to reflect, you know. And I think a lot of my writing does that, a lot of my teaching does that. It's just sort of this my ability to see and reflect the potentials in something else or someone else.
Greta says after this desert vision trip, she realized she wanted to focus on helping other people find their unique voice, and she now teaches songwriting on a regular basis.
I just kind of had this experience where it was like, oh, that is that's one of the gifts I am meant to cultivate. And I don't know what avenue it will take. I don't know how that will take shape, but that is a gift that is here underneath all of the superficiality of who I am. And that's a gift that I'm meant to cultivate. And he talks about like every person having kind of a mythopoetic identity, So it's like
I could say, like yeah, I'm Greta the singer. But there's really a much deeper aspect of identity that isn't that easily articulable, and it's not that easily categorized, and it's not sanctioned by capitalism and how I earn money and how people see me. And so I think for me, just like finding some of these deeper gifts and abilities and then learning how to cultivate them and then eventually finding the avenues for them that gave me so much purpose and meaning.
I'm sorry I'm quiet because I'm thinking I'm absorbing all of this. I am envious of the time to go out into the forest. There was a period when it was at its worst, when there just wasn't much I could do, and I had a lot of silence, partly because my head was silent and I would just go and walk in the park. But I did feel this sort of engine underneath that I had to do these therapies.
And I managed to move out a year ago, and I know, I feel like I'm still kind of running the race where because I'm a freelancer, if I take time off, then I'm not making any money. But I think there's a way to prioritize. I don't know, I'm not making a lot of sense right now, but.
Do you beat yourself up about where you are in the process.
Sometimes there was a period where I felt like I had found a kind of peace with not being able to read comfortably again, and it was like I was living very low to the ground, just having small thoughts and having small needs and no dreams about the future, just being kind of in the moment. But then I got reading back, and then it's like, Okay, all the obligation is back, all the expectations are back. Now I
can write again. So I have to keep kind of batting those expectations down, but they still come up.
It's funny, every day I feel like I have a different level of desire. Sometimes in my mind, I'm like, okay, well, you know what. Shania Twain lost her voice for seven years, Okay, and she was Shanaia Twain, and then she got a surgery and her voice came back and she performed again.
So sometimes I'll have it. I'll have someone who's like a patron saint, and I will, you know, metaphorically, light my candle every day and be like please please, saying Shania, give me this back, you know, and I create this dream that I'm gonna, like in my early forties or even in my mid forties, I'm gonna write the best album I've ever written. I'm going to be touring and my voice will heal, and the fantasy just like lives
with me. I mean, I would love to be able to sing the way that I used to sing, like I miss it all the time. It also felt so linked to my sensuality, yea, being able to sing that the way that I did. So much of it was tied to what I thought it meant to be a woman and being able to be seen and being able to express myself and having people sing songs I had written like that was the best feeling that I had felt in my life till that point.
I absolutely seduced people with my words, absolutely.
Right.
Yeah.
So then when it's gone, I did have a sense of like, well, who am how am I gonna? Yeah? What's attractive about me? Now? You know?
Yeah?
And that's a whole other exploration.
It is.
Caitlin. The other day you said you were scared to want to write again, to like want it as badly and love it as much as you did, and seems like you still do because you're afraid that you will never be the same writer get to the same quote unquote level. Yeah, and I'm wondering, like, Greta, do you relate to that?
Oh?
Yeah. I had this teacher once who told a story. He told me a story about how he used to have two cats and the two cats would play together all the time, and then one of the cats stopped playing and he took it to the vet and they found out there was a tumor that was pressing on one of its nerves, so it was in pain whenever it would start playing. But then they removed the tumor, and the cat just continued to not play anymore because it was the memory of the pain was still with it.
And he took it to the vet over and over, and the vet said, I can assure you it's not in pain. I can assure you it's not in pain. But the cat remembered, well, when I play, I hurt myself, so I'm not going to play anymore. And in my experience, even when I've had different kinds of vocal access, there's still this wounding on my relationship with singing and with songwriting, and there's this kind of all or nothing idea that
I really had to move through, you know. For example, like I can't go out and play a set of my own music. I can't go play forty five minutes. I just don't have the stamina, even on my best vocal days. And it's really easy for me sometimes to go, oh, well, if I can't have that, then why bother at all?
You know.
But the truth is for me that getting that experience of playing back, like actually singing a little bit for fun and kind of remembering that it's okay to play, and like it's okay if it doesn't sound the way it should or if it doesn't feel exactly how I think it is. It's like I have to re teach myself how to have fun doing it.
So I delayed trying to read for pleasure for a long time because I didn't even as my reading was getting better and better, I didn't want to associate that deep pleasure with nausea, just like you were saying with that wound. So it's just maybe eight months ago that I finally read a book for pleasure and it sang in me the way my inner voice used to sing in me. I was reading in a cafe and just cry, Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. I read that book and I had her voice in my head and I felt like, Okay,
now I can write now. Now it's back. But it faded. It's like a flame that doesn't stay lit.
Yeah. Yeah, I feel that. I'm curious as you're kind of learning to write again. It's an experience most people don't have this happen in a lifetime, where they lose an ability and then they suddenly can start learning as a beginner again. I'm curious just what that experience has felt like for you when you are writing. Are there any moments where like, oh, this is it? Like I feel like this is a magical sentence.
I feel like I've told you oway that I feel when I'm writing now, I feel like I'm kind of imitating my own voice. It's a much more rational process where I can say, Okay, I want an O sound, I want it to do this, I want to say this. Does it feel different for you writing songs for this new voice that you have, it's the experience inside of you different.
Yeah, totally. The way I used to write songs was what I called the fumble mumble method. So I would just like sing gibberish until I found the words I so relate to with what you said about how oh there should be an O sound here, like oh, there should be a sound. I really would kind of sing the vowel sounds on a melody and then eventually they would become words. So that was my process for writing songs.
And when I couldn't do that, it was like my entire emotional circulation system just stopped, screeched to a halt. Like I couldn't sing, I couldn't write songs. My voice just can't do what I hear. But I still have my ability to like feel and amplify an emotion to the point that it could become a piece of music. Oh, so I find myself focusing a little bit more on the aspect of I'm sorry, well.
No, go ahead, it's great. Can can you say that again? To feel and amplify, oh yeah, to.
Be able yeah, to be able to amplify I mean essentially for songwriting for me is like amplifying in emotion, usually one that is very chaotic, and then translating it into something that is a coherent piece of art. So I used to always write melody first and then fit words into a melody. And then I now turn the process inside out, where now I write the lyrics first
and then I set them to a melody. And what's funny is I can now write a song in like fifteen minutes, whereas songs used to take me like maybe twenty hours. Once I have the words, I can write the music like very very quickly. Well, I guess, I wonder do you find the story by the process of writing, Like, how would you relate?
Yeah, so many of the short stories or fiction that I wrote would start with the first line and then it would all sort of bloom into being in my imagination from there. Like when people would talk about outlining a story, Yeah, that's homework, working out the mechanics of a story. I could that, but it would be after feeling the shape of the story instinctively first. But now I feel like I'm starting with the mechanics and there's feeling there. There's still feeling there. I'm finding flashes.
I think my experience is that whenever I would have a little glimpse where I sort of felt like myself where I could access that, I would just try to amplify it and make it last as long as possible, to be aware in those moments like oh, I'm writing a song, I have goosebumps, I'm in the magic, and to just not let anything get in on that until the experience was over.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At this point in a conversation, I was itching to have Caitlin share her writing with Greta, so I asked her to read something from our past.
I was going to read this very short prose, but I have a poem that I think is actually really relevant. So and I actually haven't memorized I think. So this is New Year's Day. I will not tell you everything will be okay. I will not tell you love congs all. I'm not that kind of liar. It can be years of not all right. You can die waiting for everything.
To be all right.
Your wallet, cell phone, wedding ring, and a baggy and still not all right. I don't know what to tell you except the light stayed a minute longer tonight than it did last night. Accept your hair smells like soap, and a fat raccoon reached its hand out from under your car. A cartoon exclamation. Love won't build you a castle of everything is all right. So love for the pleasure,
Love because she never wears high heels. Love the Alleluiah of his voice in your phone, because you want to be new even now, face infant naked in the bathroom mirror.
Oh my god, Caitlin, that is so beautiful. Ah, I want to set that to music. I'm not joking. That is so beautiful. Could I ask about what was happening? Like the life circumstances.
The New Year's Day poem was. I wrote that on New Year's Day, and I was thinking about my mother when I was about thirty six. We were always hoping that she would get better. She had bipolar disorder, just like a whole whole lot of things layered, and I had always been feeling like, Okay, she's going to get better. She's going to get through this hard portion or this hard portion, and then everything will be okay. And instead
she died. And my dad asked me how I could handle the idea that she was dead if I didn't believe in heaven, if I didn't believe that I was going to see her again, And I told him that I felt like the fact that I don't believe necessarily that I'm going to see people on the other side. It helps me be very present with them right now.
So it was a lot about that, But you know, it came to me very quickly on that day, and I walked from one side of San Francisco to the other listening to that poem on spool in my head, and by the end of the day I had it.
Wow, had you typically written that way? Like just walking and writing in your head like that? That was your process?
Yeah, that was a big part of it.
Yeah, why don't we play a demo of Greta's a song that you're working on that.
Yeah, this is a new one. This is like, now that I've kind of learned how to whisper sing, I'm also trying I have in my twenty years as a professional musician, I could never write a love song. So my new challenge is to write only love songs, or at least try. Even when I have heartbreak songs, I try to kind of turn them out and turn them into love songs. So this is a little piece of a minute of a love song.
Ah in love tonight just bo.
And brath and starlight? How could he fin.
To feel you all? How could he forget you?
Re Foller to grown, How could I.
Login to be your choice? And the sound of the limb? How did I go nom again?
How did I go no again? How did I go no?
I don't know if you can really hear my voice in that I can.
There's so much.
Feeling in that thank you that really moved me.
I can feel I'm touching something different. Yeah, there's been a realization of like, Okay, there's not like a back to normal of my singing, and so the only thing I can really do is start to embrace what I have now, which is this much weirder, stranger voice, and to actually go with it. So I've been finding models of other voices, like people who have strange voices who I think are beautiful, and just to really try to
embrace it. And it's interesting now that we're entering in this moment of artificial intelligence making music, because it's all so glossy and so perfect, and they're just these computerized, perfect voices, And in a way, I'm kind of like, oh, I have a strange, different voice now that actually is something that will be unique compared to most of what
we're hearing. And so there's this way where I've just been like slowly learning to fall in love with the thing that I have rather than longing for what I used to have. But it's sad. I mean, I can't watch my old performances, Like when I watch friends play shows. It's so bittersweet because I'm so happy for them and
I love their music, and also I'm always crying. There was kind of a funny moment I went to see Nico Case play, and Nico Case texturally her voice is probably the most similar to mine, just as she has that kind of like train whistle high call out voice, and that's like the way I most miss singing. And when she started singing, I was just sobbing, and it was funny. I was like, Wow, I really look like
the biggest Mico Case fan in the entire world. Which I am a fan, not to the point where I would be sobbing at her show, but you know, I am a fan. But yeah, I still I still feel a lot of that, like grief and loss and pain, but I also am uncovering a new way of making things that I wouldn't have had before.
Yeah.
Yeah, And that was the proxy conversation.
And I would love to stay in touch and just hear more about your experience as your likewise.
A week later I checked in with Caitlin. I wasn't sure how she was feeling and if she got the answers she needed.
It was a lot.
Why was it a lot for you?
It's all just very emotional.
It was emotional for obvious reasons. There were some hard moments, like when she realized how young Greta is that she had about twenty years on Greta.
It does hit different now when I have white hair and my body is aching in places, and you know, I know that I'm on the downslope.
But Caitlyn says, Greta's age doesn't discount what she had to say. The conversation was sticking with her, especially something Greta said about not being to beholden to the ways she used to make her art.
Like there was a thing that she said about feeling to follow the feeling, and you know, it doesn't matter if it's words or pictures, it's not all or nothing, right.
And actually just this morning she had a feeling and followed it.
I can't say that it's because of the conversation, but last night, this morning I dreamed a poem. This morning, he sat up in bed, and I said, that's a gift.
It's a gift, Oh my god.
And I got my phone and I started typing it.
In the poem came to Caitlin kind of like the old way, but this time I wasn't hearing a voice. It was like watching a movie in her head and describing what she saw and felt.
Can I read it to you?
I was gonna ask, please, So.
This is the title. I woke saying thanks. In the dream, I promise a poem to the women who walk with me, pacing slow to the funeral. Were stopped by the man who failed to seduce me, and so tried my mother.
Next.
What can I do? I take a swing. He laughs at my weak right, but I get him good with the left. His face maybe the last she saw, and I feel his teeth give under my fist. It gets messy. He's still trying to laugh, his glasses ruined. We walk on. In another time. We would have washed my mother's body, my hand lifting hers like dancers, my sister cupping her head, quiet voice, stitching up the three of us skin water.
We touched the only body we ever lived inside. In the dream, the women watch me paint this poem on rough wood. My brush glides iron oxide red. I didn't know you'd gone I paint. I didn't know they touched my shoulders. The women one on each side, and the dream rests a while in silence.
That's beautiful.
Thanks brain.
What do you think of that poem? What was it like writing it?
It felt a little more organic. It's like, oh, maybe there's another way to write that isn't the voice and isn't the Frankenstein method. Yeah, it was more physical than rational, which is I think that's that feels like it fits me better.
Thank you to Caitlin Meyer for being our guest. In her most recent email, she told me she's joined a writing group and has been enjoy writing fragments and notebooks. You can follow along and support Caitlin's work on her Patreon. She also wrote the book Wiving, a literary memoir about escaping abuse, religion, and the patriarchy, for the freedom to
be alone. I very much enjoyed it, And thank you to Greta Morgan for being our proxy and for letting us play your springtime carnivore song Into the Avalanche, which you're listening to right now. Greta wrote a beautiful memoir called The Lost Voice, where she goes way more into detail about what she shared in this episode. She also has a Patreon where you can support her work and a newsletter where you can keep up with her music writing and songwriting workshops. Just go to www dot Gretimorgan
dot com. We'll link to everything in our show notes, and I really hope you check out their work. I am such a fan of both of them. Prexy will be back on Tuesday, May fifth, and then every other Tuesday until summer. Follow the show so you don't miss the next case. And if you're new here, I recommend trying Bisexual Life Guy. It's one of the clearest examples of what the show does. Prexy is an independent show, which means it grows almost entirely by word of mouth.
So if this episode made you think of someone, send it to them. That one text is how people find us. And if you want to support the show, you can join us on Patreon starting at five dollars a month. You'll get ad free listening, bonus episodes, and access to group zoom Hags, or you can join for free for our newsletter to get episode liner notes and behind the scenes gossip Just go to Patreon dot com slash podcast. Thank you to everyone who's already signed up. We literally
could not have made this spring season without you. And if you've been thinking about joining, this is a great time. It really is what keeps the show going. This season was also supported by the Independent Media Initiative, and.
We're really grateful.
This episode was edited by Tim Howard, mixed by Kyle Pooley, and produced by me with help from Rennie Spernofsky Music. In this episode by Tim Howard and our theme music is by Brickmaster Cylinder. Proxy is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supportive podcasts. Adreymartovich is the executive producer of Radiotopia. Juri Losordo is the director of Operations Discover Audio with vision
at Radiotopia dot fm. You can follow us on Instagram at Proxy podcast and I'm at Yoaishaw And remember, if you have a niche emotional conundrum you would like investigated by Proxy, get in touch at proxydepod at gmail dot com. We're taking cases. Okay, thanks for being here, guys. Bye, Any last questions?
Yeah, can you want to come to Portugal and hang out for a minute.
I was just gonna say I wish we were friends this whole time.
That was Caitlin lost the voice in her head from Proxy. You can find more episodes of Proxy at the link in our show notes, and if there's a podcast you are really loving these days, be sure to email us. You can reach us at slight Change at pushkin dot fm, and we'll consider featuring it in the slight Change feed at some point this year. We'll be back in a week with another episode of a slight change of plans. I'll see you then,