You’re The Voice

There are a lot of ways in which the word voice is defined. 

Some take the word literally. In that case, the official definition of the word, so far as Google’s dictionary has decided, is the sound produced in a person's larynx and uttered through the mouth, as speech or song. That’s the definition I’ll largely go with during this essay, so keep that in mind to the greatest extent possible.

Some would point to voice as meaning a particular person’s opinion, such as a “dissenting voice” within the HHS department, which would currently advocate for vaccines and argue that they do not cause autism. It’s pretty depressing that we’re still debating this in 2025, but here we are.

And then others talk about one’s voice as a platform to push for a given agenda. The song “You’re The Voice” by John Farnham, from which this article gets its title, uses this definition. It’s quite a powerful tune that has been used to advocate for progressive causes, perhaps most notably the unsuccessful 2023 “Voice to Parliament” referendum in Australia. But let’s talk about the literal voice.

I’ve already said this a handful of times, but I am on the autism spectrum. I make no secret of this, least of all on The Mane Course. We’re quite transparent here, the fairest blog in America. But in all seriousness, we’ve established that.

During the course of my childhood, I had a great deal of speech and occupational therapy, some of which I’ve talked about here. This included some fun activities, such as the ball pit and hammock. Supposedly, the latter is referred to as a “sensory swing,” and is used to calm neurodivergent children down. My mother cannot remember precisely what purpose it served, just that I loved it.

There were also some less fun activities, however. And the nature of my anxiety as a child was that it was hard for anyone to know in advance what would stress me out. Even now, my moods are unpredictable and don’t always make sense according to the actual situation at hand. 

One of these activities involved listening to a recording of my speech. Now, I cannot remember exactly what this activity was, or why it entailed hearing myself talk. But I do recall that when my therapist pressed a button to replay the recording, I recoiled at the sound of my voice. It wasn’t what I was expecting!

On some level, I believe my voice sounded childish to my own ears. Considering I was probably 8 or 9 years old at the time and wanted to prove that I was a Big Kid™ (aided by the fact that I was among the tallest in my class), this struck a nerve with me. I could not understand why my voice was so…odd.

To be fair, from what I’ve heard, lots of people don’t like hearing their own voice on a recording. It disarms plenty of them, and there’s actually a scientific reason for that. This article from a university in Tokyo delves into why. 

The “TL;DR” is that we hear both the vibrations in the air reaching the eardrum, as well as the vibrations within our own body that produce the voice. Apparently, when we listen to a recording of our voice, we only hear the former, which is the same as what other people hear when we speak. And I have no reason to doubt this, given the amount of research that seems to have gone into it.

Which means that this whole time, both when I was a child and as an adult now, other people have experienced my voice a different way from how I had. I still remember being arrested by my tone at age 8 or 9 - it sounded so childish and monotone, not necessarily like a robot, but like I didn’t know how to speak the way a regular person would. Well, my parents and peers had heard said voice and made a decision, whether actively or passively, not to tell me that it was different. For the record, I don’t begrudge them for that. Maybe I’d have had a hard time accepting it.

And honestly? I don’t mind being different. Normal is for squares. I will never be a square, even if a lot of dwellings here in the United States look just the same as any other from the outside. 

This sense of my vocal tone being different from other peoples’ has followed me into adulthood. Back in 2022 I called in to the David Pakman Show, a progressive political podcast that I listen to on occasion. I’m not going to link to the specific segment here, but my recorded voice was obviously the version tens of thousands of YouTube viewers heard. And my tone did not go entirely unnoticed, with one commenter saying “caller sounds like Nate Silver.”

That’s right. Apparently my vocal tone resembles that of Nate Silver, the guy who ran that website FiveThirtyEight in which they made forecast models of US elections. For the record, I’ve listened to Silver speak on a few videos, and I don’t think our voices sound at all alike. While I’m not one to speculate on Silver’s medical history, I won’t deny that it’s possible he might be autistic; people who crunch numbers to that extreme extent very often are. But his voice didn’t sound as monotone as mine.

In addition to that appearance on the David Pakman Show, I’ve sent voice messages to many of my friends on Discord. Many such people have said that they don’t see anything abnormal about my voice, but it’s of course possible that many of my Discord friends are autistic themselves and are therefore accustomed to hearing voices like that. Maybe we should think more critically about what it means to be normal.

Of course, “many” is not the same as “all”, and some people have told me, upon listening to such a message, there was a certain inflection in my speech that they couldn’t quite place. But these people have invariably told me that my voice is sweet, cute, and/or soothing - which, of course, feels immensely gratifying. 

When I heard my voice as a kid, I might have wanted to run away or sink into the floor. Unlike some other embarrassing situations, there’s no way whatsoever to hide your tone or make it sound different - that’s what many autistic people refer to as “masking.” But when it comes to my tone of voice, I don’t mask whatsoever, and that’s for two reasons.

One, I have little or no control over how my voice sounds. As stated above, I had speech therapy from sometime before I turned 2 to sometime after I turned 10. At least, that’s my memory of it. If the goal was at any point to make me speak like a normal person, all those years of therapy could not make that happen. They could correct my inability to properly make the R sound all day long, but they couldn’t mold my tone into something that sounded “average.”

Naturally, my speech patterns come with their own challenges. Today I still struggle with talking too fast and failing to enunciate, particularly when I'm very excited about whatever it is I’m talking about. I've compared it to running down a steep hill and feeling like you're unable to slow down, no matter how hard you try. And if I'm amused by whatever I'm talking about, people tell me I sound drunk. Literally: I remember riding a ski resort gondola with a stranger, shooting my mouth off about a really cool experience I’d had the other day, and the stranger asking if I’d been drinking. And I think I was like 17 at the time!

As I write this, I am a 25-year-old man. I am six feet, three inches tall and broad-shouldered. I’ve done a number of things that 9-year-old me would not have been able to imagine, and that even now feel like something a stunt double would have done. To paraphrase that hilarious “billionaire’s son” Bobby Misner, if your life is a movie and you’re the main character, you might as well make it count!

I think that’s why I’ve grown to like my voice, maybe even be proud of it. It shows how far I’ve come, the obstacles that have stood in my way and that I’ve conquered, but at the same time, it’s still my voice. I’m still the kid who was scared to sled down what was probably a small hill, as well as the FOMO-afflicted youth who begged his parents to let him ski down a mountain while wearing a parachute. 

Both of those people are me, and I am them. I am a bundle of contradictions, as they say. But aren’t we all? And that’s not even strictly related to autism, but I want to be the best version of myself no matter what. Shouldn’t we all? 

Yes, I’m not normal. But I don’t want to be.