One day, at a mentor teacher’s conference, I stood up to give a report and in horror I heard an unhuman sound come out of my mouth. Everyone looked up in surprise. I swallowed, took a deep breath and started again, but this time no voice came out.

Back in my classes, I continued having difficulty when trying to teach my adult English classes. My employers at the LAUSD tried to accommodate me by giving me a small conversation class. I ran the class whispering and the few students that I had whispered back. A new student came to the door, I whispered a welcome and motioned to a seat. He sat down, listened to everyone whispering and wondered aloud. “Do we have to whisper when we converse in intermediate English?” We all laughed, but I knew this was not working. I had to stop teaching and go on disability leave.

This was heartbreaking. Not only did I love teaching, but my income was financially essential to my family. I was teaching 36 hours a week constantly projecting my voice in large classes and inhaling too much chalk dust. My clear voice had always been one of my assets. I enjoyed using it in teaching and also reciting my favorite pieces of Persian poetry. To make matters worse, I was constantly tired and overwhelmed.

As compensation, my employers offered to pay for a new education that would help me work. They recommended a degree in counseling with an emphasis on vocational rehabilitation. “As a teacher, you have transferrable skills in working with people, and your experiences as an immigrant and as a person with a disability would give you the tools to help individuals with physical, mental, or cultural barriers to employment.” I applied to CSULA and got accepted.

To seek a cure, a slew of doctors and therapists followed. My primary care doctor, an allergy specialist, an ENT, a speech therapist, and a psychotherapist. Allergy tests showed thirty allergies, not only to chalk and dust mites but to corn products, olives, and more. I had never been allergic to anything before. I felt that my entire being was screaming for help.

Nothing seemed to work. The allergist had a facial tic, and I felt if he could not manage his own tic, he was not a good candidate to help me with my voice. The speech therapist had a high pitch voice that irritated my ears. She kept on enunciating words and asking me to repeat. After every attempt, she scolded me, “Not like that.” It came to a point that I was afraid of even opening my mouth to utter a word. Amazingly, when I recited my favorite poetry in the privacy of my home, I could manage with some effort, but no progress in her office. The ENT examination showed that my vocal cords were crossing over each other. The doctors decided it could be from overuse, and prescribed periodic Botox injections to my larynx through the skin of my neck. After each injection, the toxin completely stopped my voice for three weeks, improved my speech for three months and then I had to get a new injection. It was hard to deal with the periods of no voice at all, and I worried about ongoing use of this toxin with no end in sight. Nothing was a cure. All interventions were temporary reliefs. I had to find new ways of communication.

At a wedding, I picked up a paper napkin and wrote that I could not talk and the loud music was making it worse. I passed the note around our table. Everyone laughed and wrote back that they felt the same. All through the dinner, we kept passing notes and laughing at our game. After the dinner, when the music started, I took the hands of the niece sitting next to me and dragged her to the dance floor. We danced and laughed. Others joined.

I looked for a new speech therapist. This one was a pro, the therapist for Kirk Douglas after his stroke. She came up with a variety of techniques in working with me, and noticing my anxieties with speech therapy, she also referred me to a psychotherapist. “The body and soul are not two separate parts of our being. They are intricately interwoven and any injury to one can affect the other,” she explained. “The root of your problem is not only physical. We need to see the mental factors that might be contributing to this as well.”

The psychotherapist came up with what seemed an outrageous idea. “You have lost your voice because you do not want to use your voice. Do you hate your job as a teacher, and is this helping you avoid teaching?”

I got angry.

“Exactly the opposite. I LOVE teaching. Specially here in the United States where I can develop my own curriculum, and get eager students who work all day and make an effort to come at night and build better lives for themselves.”

It took months of therapy to delve into the topic of my voice more deeply. We met every week and talked.

Once she asked: “How is your teaching different here?”

“This is not like in Iran, where you had to teach verbatim what was handed to you. I love my creativity here. In Iran, under the Islamic Republic you had to learn to be voiceless and invisible to keep safe.

“How so?”

“As an Iranian , you were not allowed to talk about any topics, read a forbidden book, listen to music, watch a movie, dance, drink, smoke or show that you can even think. As a woman, you had additional limitations. You could not show a strand of hair or an inch of skin, look up into the eyes of a man, even your own male students, raise your voice above a mumble, or choose colors for your thick uniforms other than black, brown, or navy in the heat of Tehran.

“I see. Anything else was happening?”

“Yes. To top all of this you had to face discriminations as a Jew, and keep your family safe under the bombs with no shelters and with no option to leave.”

“Was there anytime that you could leave left?”

“Yes, early on. But my husband loved his job and was worried about leaving everything behind for an unknown world.”

“How long have you been here?


“Nine years.”

“That was a long time ago. Has anyone tried to shut you down recently?”

I had to pause and think.

“Actually yes. For my son’s bar mitzvah, I chose a reputable temple that some of our friends had used. The Rabbi was rude. In our initial meeting I told him that my husband and I were university professors in Iran. He mumbled indignantly that we were “seculars.” Then, during the service, he was mad at me because I told my son that the image I had of him as a toddler belonged to the night we were escaping from Iran through the mountains and deserts and the smuggler was carrying him like a sack of flour on his back. The Iranians in the congregation clapped for me. At the end, when shaking hands with me, the rabbi’s hands only touched the tip of my fingers in disapproval. Later the temple librarian explained that the rabbi thought I ruined Shabbat with a sad story, and he did not like that the immigrants in the congregation clapped against the decorum of his temple.

A week after the bar mitzvah I lost my voice. I hate all these labels. Woman, Jew, secular, immigrant. I just want to be me.”

“Who is ‘you’?”

I waited a long time before I could answer her.

“I am not sure. As a little girl, I did not want to be a girl. My mother and grandmother were toiling away all day, and my father had all the fun. The women served him all the time and he was the one who had time to play with me. That’s why I was the first girl in my extended family to pursue university education and a career. I wanted to be a man.”

“I have two pieces of homework for you. First: every morning, before breakfast, play a dance music and dance. Just let the music take you. No rules. Next: start writing. I know you can write. Keep writing and you will find yourself. You don’t need me anymore. Just invite me to your debut book signing.”

I did the dancing whenever I could find time, but the writing waited for sixteen years. I had to finish my internship for the school and then start working in the new field. My voice, although never as clear as before, was functional enough to allow me to work full time. After retirement, I took up writing along with volunteer work using my rehabilitative skills.