I Joined a Choir
Inclusive Cultures 2023 participant Alison Reeves reflects on her experience of joining a choir.
Towards the end of my time on the Inclusive Cultures programme, I joined a choir. Non-auditioned, just for fun, but with powerful tunes and great harmony singing. I’d been thinking about it for ages, yearning for the unity, the camaraderie, dreaming of lifting my voice in joy and hope. But I just couldn’t find the energy before. Not just the energy to be there, but for the fall out. The hours before spent making sure family life could run without me, the hours after during the next working day that would be unfocussed and scrappy because of the exhaustion I was carrying.
I heard a lot of people talking about energy in Inclusive Cultures addresses. The cumulation of voices laying out for us how much energy was required to constantly have to advocate for yourself, to ask for change, to explain, to justify your requests was overwhelming. How even before coming into a space where you needed all your physical, mental and emotional energy to be creative, you were exposed, tired, frustrated and othered. My own energy levels are something I tend to every day; fatigue is a symptom of my long-term health condition. I know that if the labour of negotiating for my own inclusion had been left to me, I would not have had the energy to join that choir.
But I also heard a lot about how to manage energy, and the radical act of slowing down. I felt the bravery that it took to just take a breath, to stick to working hours, to build in time to talk about a different way of doing things. And I saw that when a leader does this, what a ripple effect it can have. It gives us the chance not just to recover ourselves, but to look around to check that we are bringing everyone with us, that we are a unified team, that we are together.
I became very attached to this word – togetherness. I realised that this was my driver, the feeling of possibility and communality that I get when we are together, without exclusion. Being together isn’t an easy space – it is messy and requires compromise. I have been carefully carrying this question in my mind that was posed in one of our coaching sessions: What are you prepared to compromise on so that we can be together?
To me, the idea of togetherness is the opposite of exclusion. Exclusion is painful (social exclusion and physical pain share a common brain biology, see: The pain of social rejection (apa.org) ) and loneliness is a killer, literally. Togetherness is not a frivolity, a luxury; it is essential to health, to survival. Togetherness is what I was looking for when I joined the choir, and I was lucky to find it there. So it has been worth the energy, worth slowing down for, because it makes me healthier and a better helper. Knowing that was what made me take that leap and join in the end.
Because of the people I heard and met during my time on Inclusive Cultures, I am driven by a renewed purpose to make the experience of singing in a choir, or making music in a group of any kind, possible for anyone that wants it. I am better prepared to take on some of the labour of ensuring this, so others don’t have to. So we can be together and raise our voices.
