A TikTok creator racked up nearly 5 million views in a video revealing how he has spent most of his life speaking in a voice that wasn’t his own.

Timothy Daigle, now in his 40s, said he adopted a higher, tense register as a teenager to accommodate others for decades after being constantly criticized for “mumbling” during puberty.

He relaxed his throat and revealed his real voice in a viral clip shared on Aug. 31, 2025, admitting, “I realized I have been speaking in that high-pitched register my entire life.” 

Daigle’s radical vocal transformation sparked a conversation on social media among commenters who have also felt pressure to mask their natural voices to get by. Many shared that they felt Daigle’s entire energy shift out of anxiety when he spoke in his natural, calm, low tone. 

“Sir, I almost choked on my lunch when that silk came out.”

Why he hid his natural voice for so long

“What you’re hearing right now is what people would call my speaking voice,” explained Daigle.

“This is the voice that I have spoken to my children, my partners, my family with since I was maybe 14—15 years old.” He explained he adopted this way of speaking in reaction to criticism from his mother, who accused him of “mumbling” as he experienced vocal changes during adolescence. 

“Mumbling, mumbling,” he said, “That word ‘mumbling’ came out of her mouth at me in every conversation for years when I hit about 11, 12, 13 years old. So I would speak up. I would squeeze my voice…This voice is the voice I speak with for a reason.”

Daigle said he found his real voice by relaxing his throat, chest, and face.

“I did something I have not done in my adult life ever about a year ago, which was to relax my throat and let noise come out of my face the way that it wants to come out of my face.” His voice lowered and softened. “This is my unaffected, unsqueezed voice. This is what my voice sounds like,” he said. 

Daigle admitted that using his usual masked tone of voice is, “such a reflex, that doing this right now almost feels like faking it.”

He asked, “Did you start speaking differently because someone didn’t like the way you talked, or was unprepared for your voice to change when you were going through changes in your body?”

@timmaydgl

This was… an uncomfortable realization at first.  Now, it’s just a fascinating piece of my personal history that I will DEFINITELY bring up in therapy one day when talking about how aggressively I will accomodate the people around me no matter how ridiculous their problem with me is.   

♬ original sound – Timothy Daigle33

A common phenomenon, voice experts say

Commenters replied that they mask their own voices to make others comfortable. Many expressed that their vocal adjustments are trauma responses connected to gender, race, and marginalized identities.

“Your face changed when you relaxed your voice. Amazing. I have a deep female voice, and I try to get a lighter tone. It’s exhausting. I give up.”

“Poor guy has been unintentionally using his customer service voice for decades 😬.”

“As an autist, I welcome you to life realizing that you’d been behaving differently from your real behaviors for your entire life! 😄”

“It’s a trauma response. Just listen to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears’ actual voices.”

A voice teacher in the comments on an X thread where Daigle’s video was reposted recognized the common phenomenon. 

“I’m a voice teacher…. Let me tell you:  this is basically EVERYONE. 99% of people’s ‘natural voices’ are just an arbitrary accumulation of the things that happened to them. Nothing more, nothing less.”

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The post “Almost choked on my lunch”: Man discovers his “real voice” after 30 years of changing it to make others comfortable appeared first on The Daily Dot.

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