Mila – South Africa – Glentana

Part of a personal project while on tour in South Africa. Has singing in a chorus changed you?

Young Women’s Chorus member and graduating senior, Mila. Photo taken at Glentana, South Africa. The Young Women’s Chorus stopped here on a travel day to feel the Indian Ocean and spot some whales.

These past 6 years of being involved with YWCP have provided me with a safe place to grow, learn, and sing, for which I am eternally grateful. I first joined this organization in 8th grade, 13 years old in Allegro. At the end of the first year I was convinced to audition for YWC and, to my surprise, made it in! After spending so much time listening for little strains of music to come swirling and tumbling up the stairs from the room where that powerful group of women sang together, I was finally going to be one of them, I could sing with them. I was one of those incredible young women, it felt unbelievable, scary, and exhilarating all at once. I didn’t know that I had embarked on a journey of intense self realization and that this choir would be largely responsible for leading me to become a motivated, matured, and empowered young adult.

There is immense value in having something carry through so many different stages of your life so you can see how it changes you but also, how you change it. For me, it was my years in the Young Women’s Choral Projects. The effect this choir has had on me is incalculable, the person I’ve become is so different from who I was on my first day in this program. Although it sometimes feels like I’m a completely new person, I’d like to think I kept some of the old me too. I still laugh a lot, dance and sing, and stumble over my words sometimes when I get too excited. But through choir I’ve also found new and genuine happiness, a mature sense of self, and have become stronger mentally. And I think I’m finally starting to figure out how all of this works in collaboration to make me the most unique and best version of myself. I have always felt like I needed to section off all the different facets of my being, and only show them to individual groups. In choir I learned that I can be all of these things at once, I can be silly and also serious, spontaneous and thought out, this realization set me on the path towards being the authentic me with everyone, something I struggled with since elementary school.

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