Shania Twain Reveals She Lost Her Voice and Confidence in ‘Why Not? With Shania Twain’ Preview

Shania Twain may be smiling right now, as her new Oprah Winfrey Network series 'Why Not? With Shania Twain' is set to premiere this Sunday, May 9 at 11PM ET, but it was a long, arduous, difficult road to happiness, as this five-minute preview of the series' debut episode reveals.

Judging from the first few moments, the series is going to be an intimate, incredibly personal look into Twain's life and her return to her first love: making music. Nothing appears to be held back, and rather than portraying herself in a woe-is-me fashion, Twain is inspiring others and proving she isn't that much different from us in her heartaches, insecurities and passions. She is easy to relate to, and her story is one that will reel you in.

Twain, whose 'Come On Over' is the biggest selling country album of all time, had a brutal couple of years -- and even that's an understatement. In July 2004, she stopped performing publicly, despite hordes of adoring fans that wanted to hear her sing her massive string of hits.

With such success came increased pressure, especially for a perfectionist like Twain. "I was losing my voice and losing confidence," Twain admits in the clip. Nothing made her feel good, so she simply stopped performing. And then her marriage to uber producer Robert "Mutt" Lange started breaking down in 2008. But it wasn't just the average split, as Twain would soon find out.

"I was definitely shocked," she says. “Mutt was my partner in every sense. It really hurt. First, I found out my marriage was over. The next day I found out about the affair. My own friend who I had confided in had an affair with my husband. I still can't get my head around that. I really lost my sense of trust, compassion ... honesty, forget that. That's all gone. That's dead. I crashed down into what I consider an emotional mess."

The misery engulfed her full force, too, and she found herself asking if she even wanted tomorrow to come. "I was so miserable," she says. "I have never been so miserable in my entire life. I came to the realization that I had lost my ability to express myself and ability to sing. It physically would not come out of my throat or voice." Twain couldn't even sing in the shower. It was that bad.

She doesn't attribute her silence to the implosion of the marriage. "It wasn't any one crisis that did it. It was a progressive thing," she reveals. "What if I can never sing again? I will have lost my best friend. I reached a point where I had to do something." That "something" was working diligently to find her voice in 2010 and recognizing that "I am responsible for the solution."

Elsewhere in the debut episode, Twain returns to her hometown of Timmins in Ontario, Canada, to revisit her past. She faces her earliest demons -- poverty, family violence, and the untimely death of her parents -- and rehearses the first song she's written on her own in more than a decade. Twain truly turns the microscope on her life and lets her fans in. We will be watching every episode, that's for sure.

Watch the Preview of 'Why Not? With Shania Twain'