I LOVE to sing! I’ve always wanted to take voice lessons, but growing up in a small town meant that opportunity didn’t exist. So now that I live in a city, I’m taking advantage of some of the opportunities here!

I’ve been taking private classical voice lessons for almost two years now, which means I started as an adult after I was diagnosed. I’ve seen too many people say they’re too old or they can’t start something new because they’re sick, but if you don’t start now then when will you? All we have is now!

Anyway, my teacher is amazing and she lets me occasionally take a break from classical to get into pop or random karaoke, which is perfect for keeping me interested and engaged. So far I have 3 songs prepared at roughly performance level, and I’m learning another one right now called “Apres Un Reve” by Gabriel Faure, who I think is one of the most brilliant composers of all time. He’s not very well known, apparently because he wrote “art songs’ (single stand-alone compositions) rather than operas. Here’s an instrumental version of Apres Un Reve performed on violin by Joshua Bell:

I just want to point out that you don’t need to be exceedingly mobile to sing. MS doesn’t mean you can’t have hobbies, and it certainly doesn’t mean you should give up the things you love! It just means you’ll get really good at compromise. One of my compromises is that a lot of my voice training involves learning to sound like “healthy me” even when I’m fatigued or battling cold and flu-type symptoms, which I am half the time. I don’t need to sound better than anyone else, I just want to do justice to the songs that I’m singing. I want to be able to sing in a way people can hear the beauty of the song itself, the brilliance of the composition. And maybe one of these days I’ll post video of me singing, and you can let me know if I’ve succeeded!