Advice For Melodramatic Children And Theatrical Adults: How To Slowly Phase Out Having Fake-Lost Your Voice Throughout The Day So No One Challenges You

This also works for fake accents on vacation or on a night out with strangers that's gone sideways

It’s likeliest that this is happening to you in middle school, but it’s possible it might be happening to you as late as college or even one of your first office jobs.

For whatever reason, you’ve pretended to have lost your voice this morning when you first came in –

maybe you wanted the attention but couldn’t commit to a fake sprained ankle, maybe you wanted to distract people from something else you don’t want them to notice about you today.

Maybe someone else lost their voice a few months ago and you thought it seemed glamorous, and now enough time has passed that no one will get suspicious of you for imitating them. Maybe you’re interested in testing the limits of sympathy and curiosity among your peers.

But for whatever reason, you need out now, and you need to get out without losing face. Maybe you’ve got choir rehearsal after this that you forgot about and actually want to go to. Maybe everyone’s hanging out afterwards and you really want to go, maybe the conversation is firing on a new level today and you’re sick of missing out, maybe faking losing your voice isn’t as fun as you thought it would be and you’re going to try something else tomorrow, like spelling your first name a little differently or hinting darkly about something very serious that’s happening to you soon.

You’ve got to get out, but my God, be smart about it. You can’t just start chattering away at 2:30 as if nothing happened, not unless you want to get a reputation as the kind of person who pretends to lose their voice in the morning and forgets about it by the afternoon. You can’t spend all your credit now on this, not when you need to save it for future fake injuries, last-minute emergencies, pretend traffic, and all the other little tricks that get you out of a late shift or a boring commitment and make life bearable.

It’s all right, kid — you’re going to be all right — just listen to me, and do exactly as I tell you, and you’ll be able to sleep in your own bed tonight, safe as houses. This strategy works for a fake lost voice or a fake accent you deployed when you were bored and around strangers, like maybe you were on vacation and got tired of sounding different from everyone around you, or recently made some temporary new friends on a night out that you didn’t think you'd have to see again.

Step One: Have an end point in mind. When, exactly, do you plan on speaking at close to full volume/use your normal voice again? Make sure there’s a chance for a getaway afterwards, so you can go home and regroup for a few hours, so everyone else can get used to the idea of you talking again without having to hear too much of it. If you don’t have an end point in measure your progress against, you’re going to get inconsistent, and inconsistency is the enemy today.

The last thing you need is to ramp up the volume too quickly and prompt the question, “Didn’t you lose your voice this morning?” That’s game over. There’s no answer to that question. You could try an explanation like “I went to the infirmary and got some ibuprofen and that helped a little” or “I had a few Hall’s lozenges during lunch,” but no one’s going to believe you.