"This is the voice I want to use", said Vivian to the clerk

My mouse started doing all sorts of funny stuff and a quick check determined it was more the computer connector than the mouse itself. So I needed a USB mouse.
Off goes merry Vivian to the store! After I found one that would suit my needs and my budget (or maybe it's the other way around), I headed to the counter not really looking at anyone around me. The giggles and the whispering have subsided a lot these days, now replaced by palpable doubt; and I found myself thinking about something my sweetheart had told me more than once: that even though I didn't completely pass as female on close inspection, I didn't look like a man at all. That's so neat! I have left maleness enough to not stick out like a sore thumb everywhere I go. I wasn't very much dressed even: jeans, spaghetti tank, sandals, purse, nothing fancy.
Then it came the time to pay and my voice, even though it came out naturally, it was kind of muffled and strained. This gave me the jeebies and I got a little clumsy with the credit card reader. The clerk guy was really nice though, smiling all the time and not making me feel like a clumsy dummy ("You were banished because you were clumsy?"*).
It's something one builds on through time and experience, but sometimes I feel as if I couldn't speak at all. Silly me. Ok, my allergies are working me up too, but I think I need to work more in my fem voice. It's still too atonal and low and not too interesting, really. But it's becoming more and more me, though, more my own female voice and not something stilted and foreign like at first.







*the phantom menace