I’ve been to a few concerts over the past five years where I’ve realized that my favorite singers’ voices have changed. Aged.

They don’t sound the same.

I felt something like … grief, in that.

Recently Lisa Stone in an Instagram comment referenced a post I wrote, God, over a decade ago, about the fall of the Disney princesses photography series by Dina Goldstein.

Lisa’s blog is still intact, so I had the bizarre experience of getting quoted back to myself from before Twitter existed. Her post is still intact, her link referencing my old blog is not.

 Why are these images so powerful? The insight that cracked me like an egg was Rita's:

"In real life, happiness is the time spent being thankful you aren't going through hell anymore. In real life, we don't know happy unless we've been sad, really sad, or really angry, or really sick. Once we've been all of those things, we learn to appreciate moments when nothing is wrong --- and see them as happiness instead of the status quo."

This month, this November, this season of leaves falling, has hit me different.

Last November, I was, like all of us, confronting the reality of a lost year, lost trick or treating, lost Thanksgiving football games spent drowsing by your in-laws’ TV, lost Christmas mornings. Lost weddings and graduations and funerals. A million lost funerals.

Applauding strangers at 7 pm and hoping they would still be alive in the morning to go to the hospital and try to stop people from dying of a previously unknown disease.

Reading about the refrigerated trucks that became morgues, the triaged ventilators, the opaque X-rays. The things we’ve never seen before, that will be what we’ve never seen before until we use the word “unprecendented” again.

When I hear these artists sing, I wish their voices sounded the same.

But then I realize my voice doesn’t.

Even though mine echoes through a keyboard instead of vocal chords, mine has changed forever, too.

I grieve that, a little. That girl Rita used to bring the voice.

I wonder if the singers feel that way, too.

Because, truth be told, until Lisa commented I forgot what I wrote about the Disney princesses. I forgot about the time when I had a job and it was to write. There was a blissful decade in my life when my job was to notice important things. To comment. To care.

I remember the night Osama bin Ladin was killed. I found about it in the shower, around midnight. I stayed up, because I needed to write.

I can’t find the post now. The sands of the Internet have ever so gradually, post by post, tweet by tweet, pin by pin and snap by snap, covered it in other people’s thoughts, and not even the Wayback Machine can help.

I’m okay with losing my relevance.

I’ve realized I’m not okay with losing my voice.