The voice that raised me

A moment can be described two completely different ways, using the same facts, and land in totally different places depending on which voice is narrating it. Same event, same reaction, same person feeling it. The only thing that changes is the tone doing the interpreting.

I think most people assume their inner critic is just being accurate. Blunt, maybe harsh, but accurate. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make the voice in my head kinder, but it honestly feels like cheating. Like if I soften it, I’m just softening reality. I've always believed compassion is something you could add after the truth.

I find it very hard to believe the quieter/kinder voice could actually get closer to the truth. I’ve heard the other one for so long that I stopped experiencing it as a perspective at all. It became the lens I saw myself through. The voice in my head is and always has been me, changing it would be like changing the core of who I am.

So the problem is that the harsh voice doesn’t feel like just another perspective, it feels like me.

That voice has called me weak for crying about something small, it's told me I'm extremely needy for wanting a little reassurance, that I have to overthink literally everything, that I'm exhausting to be around when I feel and think so deeply. And I've just been believing it as it's grown throughout my life. It's built itself up little by little, and I never questioned it. By the time I noticed how loud it was, it had already become the background noise of my mind.

And here's where it gets confusing for me. That same voice is also the one that's gotten me through everything I've been through. It's helped me survive things I wasn't sure I'd survive. Some part of me has to believe that voice actually served me at some point or I wouldn't have made it this far. How can the same thing that’s carried me so far be the thing that’s holding me back and hurting me most?

Now I have no idea the answer to that, this is just train of thought, but I think that voice was built in response to the life I was living at the time. I think it was useful and I needed it at times, even if it wasn't right. Letting go of it feels so scary because my brain naturally assumes I need it to live.

But the thing is I'm not that version of myself anymore. I'm not scared of vulnerability anymore, I've spent years learning how to be open. I did my work and it was very hard and exposing. I truly know crying over something small doesn't make me weak. I truly believe everything happens for a reason. And I’m ~ on my way ~ to truly believing that things don’t have to look exactly the way I always imagined, for them to still be exactly what I need. I’ve spent years undoing the things this voice taught me.

So why the hell am I still holding onto it!?? Shouldn't changing my beliefs automatically change the voice? I've torn down the whole foundation it was built on, but the voice itself has been speaking for sooo many years that it doesn’t know the conversation has changed. It keeps repeating lines from a story I no longer believe because that’s all it’s ever known how to do. I’ve mistaken its consistency for truth.

I don't agree with the voice in my head anymore. (I first typed out "I think I don't agree...", but I know I don't agree with it.) I know my worth now. That’s what makes this so confusing. The things this voice says about me don’t line up with everything I’ve spent years learning. It makes no sense.

Here I am in this strange and very uncomfortable in between. Lowkey for the first time, I just admitted I don’t believe what the voice in my head is saying anymore. And this actually feels like betrayal, like I'm having a convo between 2 parts of myself, one is saying "after everything I’ve done to get us here, you’re telling me I was wrong?" I respond with "yeah you're right, I still hear it, right now, all the time, that voice is still there and it's still the loudest one there! I guess it has gotten me what would've been my dream life years ago sooo I'll keep listening in. my bad."

If that voice isn’t the truth about who I am, then what is? It has commented on literally everything to ever happen to me. Every mistake, every choice, every relationship, every fear, every success. It knows me better than anyone else does. So yeah, part of me feels guilty for wanting it to go away. Again, it's like I’d be abandoning something that’s only been trying to protect me this whole time. It's on my team right? It wants the best for me right? And there it goes, that's the harsh voice justifying and disguising itself as the kind voice. Omg this is getting too twisted. Overall, I can't just drop this part of me. What about the next time I need it?? I know life isn’t done asking me to survive and there will be more times I don't know how I'll possibly get through what's in front of me. Smart me says it's not gonna be by listening to that voice again, and that the root here is probably about changing my perspective on surviving. And believing that insanely critical voice is not my identity. As I change, that voice can change too. But it clearly takes some more work, patience and focus.

Looking back, I didn’t survive because I was mean to myself, I survived while I was mean to myself. I need to understand: surviving doesn't have to come at the expense of myself, just because that voice was present during the hardest parts of my life so far, it's not what got me through them, and self abandonment and criticism are not the same thing as resilience.

I always say I'm a curious person, I say I love to learn. So I'm going to try to reframe it from letting go of my identity/a part of myself to just getting curious about what else could be true. But of course there's still some grief in the current voice getting quieter. Will I recognize myself? Will this new version of me actually feel right??

We spend so much of our lives trying to become ourselves that when we finally start changing, it can feel like we’re becoming someone else. I've heard people say they don’t feel like themselves during times of growth. And my mom sent me a quote recently: "I haven't felt like myself lately; I must be growing. What a wonderful f*cking way to look at uncomfortable seasons. The grass is being watered and the garden will come back." I feel this. I’ve tried to change this internal voice, and I've been hoping and waiting for the kinder version of it to feel like me before I let myself trust it. It feels unfamiliar and quite inauthentic right now. When it speaks, I feel like I'm losing who I am or I'm giving myself too much slack. It feels off.

But let's be real, the mean voice has had decades of practice. The compassionate one is just learning how to speak. Of course one feels like home and the other feels like a stranger. That doesn’t mean the stranger isn’t me. Healing has probably felt so uncomfortable lately because I’m trying to close the gap between what I consciously know to be true and the voice that automatically comments on my life. I’m changing the narrator now, and that feels like a much slower & harder project.

The kind voice. Even as I type that, I think of it as the baby voice. The one that's coddling me, too soft too be trusted with real life. What's wild is that this kinder voice isn't any of that most of the time. It's usually just as accurate, sometimes more accurate, because it accounts for context the harsh version conveniently skips. The kinder voice just asks what else could be true, it doesn't reject the story. Example: I’ve gotten to a place where I truly believe being sensitive isn’t a flaw. But I don’t think I ever stopped to ask myself what it actually is then. If it isn’t a flaw, a weakness, then what does it mean? I spent so many years proving the old story wrong that I never realized I also had to write a new one! I forgot healing also asks you to build something in its place. No wonder the kinder voice still feels unfamiliar. I never gave it a story to tell.

As I'm writing this, my view of healing is expanding. I'm realizing it's less about disproving old stories and more about telling different ones. The voice I know: “I’m not weak". And then you have the kind voice. It doesn’t even acknowledge the accusation, it doesn’t need to: "I’m deeply sensitive, and that sensitivity allows me to love, create, connect and care.”

So it's kinda hitting me now. The kinder voice isn’t more compassionate because it ignores reality, it’s more compassionate because it tells more of it!!! It is closer to the truth.

The harsh version is wrong because it's incomplete and it leaves out the half of the story that makes me human instead of messed up. It only tells the parts of the story that support its conclusion. It notices my sensitivity, but forgets to mention my capacity to love. It sees my need for reassurance, but skips over how deeply I care about the people I let close. It calls me emotional without acknowledging that my emotions are also where my creativity, empathy, and joy come from. It tells the story like it’s presenting evidence, when really it’s just leaving out half the facts. Facts I’ve finally come to believe over years of self work and reflection. I never realized they belonged to the same story. These facts are me, they aren't separate, they're all pieces of the same person. And together they tell a completely different story, but one that does not support the conclusion of this voice I've listened to for so long. Pretty contradicting.

The goal isn't replacing that voice with a nicer one and forcing myself to trust it. That would just be another performance and another way of trying to control the narrative. The goal is realizing that the voice in my head is exactly that. A narrator. Yeah we all know there's a voice in our heads, but damn after hearing the same one repeated all your life, it can start to sound like reality. It becomes your reality. It becomes your identity instead of an interpretation. That's just how it is. That's my belief, that ladders up to my values, to who I am, and that will never change because it's who I really am at my foundation. I should trust this voice because it’s been shaped by every experience I’ve ever had.

No.

I am slowly separating who I am from the voice that’s been introducing me to myself all these years. I don’t know if it’ll ever completely go away, but I don’t think I need it to anymore. Because for the first time, I'm starting to see it for what it is. Not my foundation or identity, literally just one perspective that usually arrives in my head first because it has decades of practice. Speedy mfer. The kind voice doesn't have to be the loudest to be the truest. I just has to be the one I get curious about, and ultimately choose.

I'm at a point in life where I'm trying to believe that nothing ends with certainty, it ends with curiosity. Who I might I grow into when I stop confusing familiarity with truth? What does my life and my head sound like when it’s narrated by a voice that tells the whole story?

If the old voice taught me how to survive, maybe this one will teach me how to live. This has all got me curious. And excited and scared. I started writing this talking about survival and now I'm ending it talking about living. I started writing this believing that the voice got me here, and now I'm realizing wait no, I got me here. The voice just came with me.

I was never the voice trying to protect me, I was always the person it was trying to protect.

It did the best it could with what it knew and I’ll always be grateful for that. At the same time, I know this voice that kept me alive can't be the one that defines my life forever. There’s a big shift happening in my mind. I don’t know exactly what it sounds like yet, but I know it’s going to ask me to question parts of myself I’ve believed for a very long time. I know it’ll take time before it feels like home. Until then, I’m going to keep listening, and reminding myself that every single story has another side. I’ll keep ya updated.

with love, sm