Voices

When I was a kid I used to do these voice imitation things. Like, I'd put on different accents, imitate celebrity voices or whatever. One time, I went about a week or so changing my voice every day. I'd spend one day speaking in a cockney accent all day, the next, an Arnold Schwarzenegger imitation, the next I'd do a hoarse Glaswegian voice. Anyway, it got to the point where I forgot what my actual voice sounded like. Have you ever had that? It's a surreal moment of depersonalisation. It was kind of like that thing people get when they hear themselves on a recording, the "do I really sound like that?" moment where they're not entirely certain it's them because they're hearing their own voices without the differing timbre and such created by their own skulls. It was like that but taken to the extreme. "Do I really sound like that? Hang on, what do I actually sound like?" 

It was genuinely terrifying, like losing a piece of the self, or rather, not knowing it at all. Never told anyone about it either, never wrote it down anywhere, but people (randomers as well as family and friends of) would always say that I don't sound like I'm from Liverpool (sadly, I do sound more Scouse now, which is a shame as I cannot stand that fucking accent...thinking on it, probably some psychosomatic thing that caused the change in voice in the first place...hmm) and of course, that just fueled the fear that I had done something to my voice. That it wasn't *my* voice, if that makes sense.