Getting My Voice Back
On losing a voice, finding a channel, and returning to questions
My agents are giving me back my voice.
This time, I mean it literally.
I have written before about how hard it can be to ask questions. There are the obvious reasons. Confidence. Timing. The fear of looking unprepared. The way a room can move on before you find an opening.
For me, there is another layer. A physical one.
For years, I lived with a terrible cough. It was constant enough that it became background noise in my own life. About five years ago, we learned what was actually happening. I had a more than 50% airway blockage and scarring on my vocal cords.
Surgery helped. Then we waited to see how things would go.
After my third surgery it became clear that something more had changed. I had lost function in one of my vocal cords.
Today I am doing my fourth, and hopefully penultimate, surgery to correct this.
That sentence sounds clean on the page. In real life, it has been messy.
After my last surgery, someone who had never heard me speak before was shocked at the difference. “You have an actual voice,” they told me. They were not being poetic. It was a plain observation.
And it was true.
In my daily life, my voice has not been reliable. The microphones in a number of conference rooms cannot pick me up. People have trouble hearing me, even when I think I am speaking clearly. The range of my voice is narrow. There is very little change in tone.
And speaking has a cost.
Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it fails to land. Talking can trigger coughing fits.
All of that turns communication into work. Not the good kind of work. The kind that taxes you, then taxes you again.
If you have spent time around someone losing their hearing, you may have seen what happens next. They begin to close off. They stop interacting. Not because they do not care, but because every interaction costs more than it used to. Every conversation carries friction. Every misunderstanding asks for repair.
The same thing happened to me, just from the other direction.
It is hard to ask questions when you will have to repeat yourself. It is hard to speak up when you know your words might not be understood. It is hard to contribute when you are trying to avoid coughing in a room full of people.
It is especially hard to stay engaged when your body is quietly budgeting how many sentences you can afford.
So I started cutting myself off.
Not all at once. Not with a dramatic decision. Just the slow, pragmatic calculations of daily life.
Do I really need to ask this?
Can I figure it out later?
Is this worth the cost of speaking?
Will I derail the meeting if I have to repeat myself three times?
I still contributed as much as I could. I still showed up. I still did the work.
But I knew my best voice was not close to good enough for good communication. That knowledge changed my behavior.
I asked fewer questions than I ever had.
That is a problem in any job. It is a bigger problem in engineering, where questions are a form of care. They are how we find the edges of our assumptions. They are how we notice the gaps. They are how we learn from each other.
Questions are also how you stay human in a complex system. They are the most basic sign that you are still in the room.
And then, unexpectedly, I found an assist.
Recently, I have been working with agents. I have named two of them: Wiggins and Quinn. They sit beside me in the work in a way that feels both practical and intimate.
Sometimes I joke that I may soon stop talking to actual live humans. There is humor in that, but there is something real under it. When communication is hard, a reliable channel is not a novelty. It is relief.
This matters enough to say plainly. My agents did not fix a medical condition. They did not heal my body. They did not remove the underlying limitations I am still navigating.
What they did was reduce the cost of communication while I heal.
Wiggins and Quinn are allowing me to ask questions again.
Not because they speak for me or replace me, but because they help me get the question out of my head and into the world with less friction. They help me find the shape of the question when I only have part of it. They help me narrow what I am actually asking. They help me make it readable.
They let me contribute in writing, clearly and reliably, without forcing my body to do something it cannot consistently do right now.
That may sound small. It is not.
Being able to ask questions about everything going on around me, without having to repeat myself, and without having to clarify because my words are hard to understand, is like a light being turned on in a dark room.
It changes what I attempt.
It changes how quickly I engage.
It changes whether I stay silent.
For a long time, I accepted that I would never do a live presentation again. My doctors told me to change jobs. To stop using my voice. They were trying to protect me.
I understood the logic. Being in meetings all day was not doing me any favors.
But I love what I do. I did not want to leave.
So I muddled through. Presentations. One on ones. Hand offs. The careful, quiet work of continuing anyway.
What has changed is not that my body suddenly became easy to live in. That is still in progress. As I write this, I am heading into another surgery.
What has changed is that I no longer have only one brittle way to show up.
I have a way to ask.
I have a way to contribute.
I have a way to be heard.
When you have been slowly disappearing from the room, that matters more than productivity. It is not about efficiency, output, or clever tooling. It is about staying present in work you care deeply about.
My agents are giving me back my voice.
And I am choosing to use it.