My friend had just sent me a one-minute and forty-second voice note. I listened to it while staring at the ceiling, paralysed by the sheer production value. She sounded effortless, casual, and perfectly pitched, as if she were hosting a critically acclaimed podcast from her living room sofa.

Social etiquette dictated that I reply in the same medium. Responding with text would be passive-aggressive. It would essentially translate to: “Look, I heard your vocal message, and I am rejecting it with the cold, calculated distance of the alphabet.”

So, I had to speak. I took a deep breath. I pressed my thumb against the little microphone icon. And immediately, my brain evacuated my skull.

Holding down the voice record button feels exactly like holding a live grenade, except the explosion only destroys your dignity. The pressure is immense. You are suddenly performing a one-take monologue for an audience of one, and every biological function becomes painfully obvious.

Attempt 1: “Hey! Oh my god, yeah, that is so crazy!” I stopped. I sounded entirely fake. I sounded like a local radio DJ, aggressively trying to interrupt the song to deliver his nonsense. I dragged my thumb to the left and watched the little red trash can swallow my failure.

Attempt 2: “Hey, wow, I can’t believe that happened…” I cleared my throat. The throat-clear sounded wet and aggressively loud, like a diesel engine failing to start in sub-zero temperatures. Cancel. Swipe left.

Attempt 3: I overcompensated for the DJ energy and aimed for ‘casual cool.’ I spoke so slowly and quietly that I sounded like I was reporting a hostage situation from inside a coat closet. Swipe left.

Attempt 4: I closed my eyes, spoke quickly, ignored a slight voice crack, and hastily took my thumb off the screen.

Send.

It was gone. And then, I committed the ultimate act of modern torture: I pressed play on my own voice message.

Listening to your own voice note is a profound out-of-body experience. It is the precise moment you realise that the rich, resonant voice you hear inside your head is a total biological lie. The voice crawling out of the speaker was nasal, hesitant, and entirely unconvincing.

I stared at the screen, horrified by the permanent, high-definition evidence of my own vocal cords.

Derrida famously critiqued something called logocentrism, the historical bias in Western philosophy that values speech over writing.

For centuries, philosophers argued that speech was superior because it was alive. When you speak, you are physically present. Your breath, your tone, and your immediate intentions are right there in the room.

Writing, on the other hand, was viewed as a dead thing. It is a lonely orphan detached from its author. Writing is permanent, rigid, and open to misinterpretation because the speaker is not there to defend it.

When you leave a voice note, you are speaking, but you are not present. You are creating an audio-fossil. You are trapping your living breath, your awkward pauses, and your embarrassing voice cracks in a digital amber that your friend can replay, analyse, and use against you in a court of law. It strips away the ephemeral safety of a live phone call, where your mistakes respectfully evaporate into the atmosphere the moment they are spoken.

The truth is, my fear of recorded permanence is deeply rooted in my own private history. Buried deep within the recesses of my phone lies the default "Voice Memos" app.

Inside this cursed folder is an audio file from a brief, dangerously ambitious period when I attempted to play the transverse flute. It sounds less like musical notes and more like the distress signals of a sinking Victorian submarine. Directly below that is a recording of me trying to sing. It is a vocal performance so pitchy and horrifying that it could be classified as advanced psychological warfare.

And further down the list are several ominous tracks of me just... reading out loud. What was the endgame here? Was I secretly preparing to narrate an audiobook? Was I trying to capture the dramatic, philosophical resonance of my own inner monologue? Oh, there is also one where I try to read a poem aloud with the gravitas of a theatre actor who has had too much espresso.

I have absolutely no idea, but are these speeches superior, in the sense of logocentrism? Maybe they should have listened to those before jumping into this decision and condemning writing.

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Cut to 3:00 AM. The apartment was entirely silent. The air was still. And then, from the dark hallway, a sound erupted. It was a deep, guttural, operatic yowl. It was a primal scream.

If it wasn't a demon summoned from the underworld, it was the cat. Apparently, she did not do a soundcheck. She did not clear her throat. She did not swipe left to delete her previous attempt because she felt her pitch was a little too "needy" or "aggressive."

She does not suffer from the anxiety of the archive. She does not care about how she sounds. If she is hungry, she yells. If she is bored, she yells. Her vocalisation is pure, unedited existence.

I turned on the bedside lamp and looked down the hall. There was a fresh pond of puke on the ground, and she was aggressively attacking the carpet fringes. She looked up at me, blinked slowly, and walked into the kitchen as if nothing had happened. She leaves no digital footprint, only highly acidic stains on my wood parquet.

Her voice belongs entirely to the physical space it occupies, and once it echoes away, she is free.

Under the heavy, philosophical weight of my cat’s 3 AM confidence, I realised the absolute absurdity of my four deleted voice notes.

I was trying to curate spontaneity. I treat a casual message like an official statement to the press. I cannot live my life attempting to edit my own breath perfectly. The "umms," the throat-clearing, the weird inflexions, are those failures of communication? I try to see them as the acoustic friction that proves we are actually human beings, not highly polished AI agents generating text-to-speech.

I thought about the 35 embarrassing voice recordings sitting in my phone's hall of shame. It is spring, and a good time for postnasal drip to build up in your throat. Why not record something new now?

Keep speaking into the void,

Asena

RABBIT HOLE

Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things (I don’t promise) I have read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click the links below to explore more.

I saw this series of “advice” from 1938. A simpler time, when the air was filled with the scent of leaded gasoline and the crushing weight of patriarchal expectations. According to these "tips," a woman’s primary job on a date was to possess the conversational range of a goldfish.

Let’s break down these vintage "musts" with the side-eye they deserve.

If you think they are of any use to you, here is the rest:

It turns out that in the 16th and 17th centuries, if you ran out of paper and had a burning desire to draw poultry, the Holy Bible was apparently your best bet. Chetham’s Library has highlighted a 1577 Bishops’ Bible that features a literal flock of over twenty hand-drawn chickens lounging in the margins right after the book of Genesis.

Since paper was notoriously expensive and scarce between 1500 and 1700, the blank pages in these heavy volumes were often treated as multipurpose household surfaces.

These sketches, probably a joint effort between an adult and a bored child, accompany formal family records. This type of "literary vandalism" was actually a popular trend in families of that era. The library’s collection also includes doodles of horses, unusual creatures, and even amateur reproductions of medical diagrams.

Instead of merely being sacred texts, these Bibles served as a family's living archive and scrapbooking space. This shows that, even four centuries ago, people couldn't resist jazzing up a blank margin with a few bored doodles.

Here are some more details and photos:

That’s it. You’ve now officially reached the bottom. Thank you for reading. ❤️ Your reward this week is the pair representing the perfect balance between yourself and the unrefined inner child you actually discovered hiding under forty layers of defence.

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