A pretty significant silver lining to this pandemic, and subsequent forced slowdown of my career in favor of my children’s education, has been the time to, as my counselor friend says, “do the work”.
After over a decade in therapy, I’m finally incorporating a lot of the practices that have been espoused to me time and time again. Self-compassion, mindfulness, gratitude. And they’re helping. There is a big part of me that wishes I’d paid attention much earlier to save myself from the anguish of so many bad habits, but I’m not sure there was ever an intersection of time and wisdom in the way that there is now. My career may be suffering, but for the first time since my depression surfaced from the tar pits of my soul in my early twenties, I have hope that I am actually changing my neural pathways. Neural pathways that have been deeply honed to champion exclusively masochistic self-critiques in every situation from parenting to daughtering to partnering to grocery shopping to ordering a goddamn pizza.
As I crawled out of adolescence, my inner critic was just one of many voices directing me. I had external forces — my parents, teachers, coaches — providing guidance. But as I aged, their influence quieted and my internal monologue took center stage. It used their voices, distilled to the shrillest and darkest version, in order to command my attention and hold it, vice-like, until I acquiesced or snuffed it out.
As I navigated the freedom of young adulthood, I vacillated between embrace and rejection of the voice’s direction to mixed results. At times, rebellion led to great adventure and self-discovery, others to heartbreak and immorality. Having spent my childhood doing my best to avoid ever experiencing consequences of my actions, I progressed into my twenties unable — due first to a lack of awareness, and later to a lack of proficiency — to acknowledge my own contributions to negative outcomes and the courage to address them constructively. When I couldn’t secure validation from my partner or my parents or my bosses, I resorted to endorsement from my own toxic and addled inner critic. The more I relied on its counsel, the more powerful and frightening it became. Its condemnations seeped further and its recompenses more demanding. Weary from the constant admonishment, I drowned it in alcohol and exhausted it with over-exercise. A cycle of dizzy distraction followed by stints of captivity in a dark hole of depression developed. Rinse and repeat for years.
Then, my son.
He arrived and the hole contracted. Not slowly, but all at once. Completely evaporated. All the way to the surface I rose. I had purpose and direction. My inner critic was impressed, the external critics were elated.
Who says a baby can’t fix things?
He fixed my marriage, my relationships with friends and family, my internal brokenness. In his purity, I was made whole.
Then, his sister. My heart grew immediately to fit her perfect shape. No longer in a hole, no longer on the ground, I was on a hill. A hill that allowed me to look down on others.
I found religion. I ate local and organic. I wasn’t just acceptable, I was superior. No longer judged by myself, I could now stand on my hill and judge others. A new kind of high, a new kind of drug.
What I didn’t know was that I had not been healed. I’d simply been distracted by the glory and busyness of new motherhood. The pattern of my childhood — of avoiding conflict, tough decisions, hard conversations — to maintain appearances and elude pain had not been broken. It was etched on my insides and the births of my children merely covered it with sand. But the wind blew, like it is destined to do, and the sand drifted away and there it lay — bare and raw.
My daughter was six months old when the voice erupted, loud and cantankerous, angry at being suppressed for so long. I resumed in earnest the desperate search for validation of my every choice to defend against its now unceasing denunciations.
It could be anything. A raise, a compliment, a laugh.
Anything from anyone to say that I was good enough. That someone thought I was fun or interesting or pretty. That I wouldn’t ruin my children with my darkness. That I was desired and worthy.
Once I tasted it again, the sweetness of someone else’s acceptance of me, and the way it stuffed the critic’s mouth until its protests were muffled and weakened, I craved it more and more. I would contort myself into anything to get it. Be whoever I needed to be to please. My appetite for it disoriented me until I no longer recognized my own hunger for it and I would take any scraps that were thrown my direction.
It couldn’t last. The appetite grew too big — it consumed everything until there was nothing left to swallow.
My marriage ended. My family left disappointed. My friends left confused and divided.
There was shame, unrelenting shame.
No more validation, only condemnation. No one knows what to say when you are covered in the cancer of failure. All you can hope for is pity or avoidance.
With nothing left outside to fight against it, the inner voice became my only voice, and it said, over and over, that there was nothing left for me out there. No one needed anything this mangled and broken. The world was better off without my blackened and ruined soul. The kindest thing I could do was to just leave everyone alone — to spare them from my nauseating existence.
Back in the hole, deepest this time, covered in so much dirt. The hill a mirage, a blurry distant memory.
There was no rapid ascent out of the hole the second time. This time I was broken and armed only with my hands. In the rare moments when the voice exhausted, I started to dig, clawing out one handful at a time, shoving the soil beneath me. I didn’t know it then, but there were others above, those who saw me fall in and didn’t walk away, scratching out the ground to find me.
We met somewhere in the middle of the gulf, the sun finally touching my face again. I’d been down there so long that I didn’t look the same anymore. My body was battered and I had grown paranoid of my own mind, enraged and bewildered by that incessant inner voice. My drive to shut it up by sourcing validation in any way I could nearly ruined my life, and then, at my lowest, my voice tried to kill me.
Now I wanted to kill it — to shut it up forever.
I was angry, so angry— at myself, at the mess my life had become. At the inability to listen to the voice and at the voice’s inability to make me listen. Someone had to be at fault and there was no one left but me. So in that hole, I separated me from me and blamed the voice.
And that’s where I’ve lived since I destroyed my old life. Bitter and combative at a part of my insides that I feel like failed me.
It is only now, since I’ve begun “the work” that I have realized that the inner voice is actually me. It is not an outside evil spirit or a manifestation of a villain from traumatic childhood experiences. It’s a twisted, neglected, overgrown and unkempt part of me. It doesn’t need to be destroyed, it needs a friend. It needs someone to acknowledge when it is wise and protective. It needs gentle correction when it devolves into petty judgement. It needs me to accept that I have failed and have been failed, that I have been hurt, and I have done the hurting.
It needs me to own my whole story, the complicated chaos of it. It needs me to really look at the hard parts of my life and face up to where I fell short, and have the character to change the thought patterns that led to the behaviors that led to the failings. It needs me to both accept and not accept the parts of me that do not function the way I want them to. It needs me to continue being considerate and thoughtful but stop short of allowing my consideration to warp back into a validation addiction.
It needs me to know that I only get one life and I don’t have to spend any more time imploring someone or something to tell me that I deserve to live it.
It needs me to do the work and accept that we are in this together. It’s not me against myself anymore, it’s us against the world.
