THE VOICE IN MY HEAD

The wind on my face didn’t work

I was working my first job after college teaching math and chemistry in an upper middle class Catholic high school and things were not going smoothly. I was totally unprepared for the culture. The teachers working together to dictate policies. The students working together to dictate grading. The gigantic amount of work. The long hours. My gramma dying slowly of cancer which spread to her brain so the last thing she ever said to me was that she hated me (for not making her better). And the topper…my house fire bombed, my roommates brother murdered by his best friend in the middle of the local mall, and all of his friends moping around my front room for months. (The friend eventually apologized. He thought the brother had the ‘tapes’ of what they said to each other as kids, but realized John Lennon had them).

It was all too much for this 22 year old. I moved to an apartment on the other side of town and distanced myself from pretty much everyone and everything. Except my thoughts. They followed me. And the loudest thoughts were this voice in my head that just wouldn’t shut up. It was persistent. It was obnoxious. It pointed out every flaw in every little thing I did. Criticized my every move. It wouldn’t shut up. I was stuck alone with this thing. It was really starting to irritate me, but I felt helpless to stop it. Then one winter night, alone in my front room with my struggles filling my head, I thought I might try to freeze it out by going outside and stand against the wind until I was so cold I wouldn’t be able to pay attention to it anymore.

It didn’t work. No matter how long or cold I got standing there, I couldn’t bring the cold to the forefront of my consciousness. All l I could think about, all I could ‘hear’, was the voice in my head bitching at me. I felt I was a prisoner, unable to choose my thoughts, my life.

But in some ways it did work. I got so pissed that I couldn’t control my own thinking that it became an obsession. I was now bound and determined to win this. To break out/take over my own thinking and run my own life. I started researching, reading up on it, thinking up approaches, focusing on it. Exercise helped (and still does) temporarily. If I exercised hard enough my thoughts would start responding to the overwhelming demands of my muscles complaining and my lungs demanding air :-) It was a short term solution, but a start. Improv piano playing helped too.

It took a several years but I eventually came across the answer. I had tried mantras; ‘Be here now’, ‘Ooomm’, ‘Relax into the earth’ etc. Then one day in a frustrating battle between me, myself, and I, I was particularly angry and finally yelled ‘FUCK IT!” In my head. Not like a ‘fuck you’ but more like "Fuck it. I’m doing this! You are not going to win. You might as well give up", followed by a moment mental of silence. (Picture my surprise as a big eyed emoji!) The voice came back pretty quickly, scolding me for getting that mad, so I tried it again. It worked again! I kept on with it and figured out that if I repeated it quickly enough for long enough with no empty space in-between for the voice to fit into, after a minute or so (could have been 10 second as far as I know) I couldn’t remember what it was the voice was complaining about! It’s a moment I’ll never forget.

Eventually I refined my mantra down to a firm ‘NO!’ (My catholic upbringing made it difficult to use the F-word :-) when the inner negative raises it’s voice. It’s now my ‘get out of jail free’ card. :-)

Addendum:

Much later I learned to give the voice a name (Karl :-) Like, ‘Shout up Karl!’ Works pretty well and probably would have saved me a lot of time and effort :-)

Post Script:

I very recently was having inner voice issues, applied my mantras, and got past it, only to find the voice wasn’t actually gone. It was whispering in the background. Apparently I’ll be revisiting this essay :-)