Before We Could Choose

It was given to us early, and before long it sounded like us.

There is a voice that has been with us since before we can remember, and we no longer hear it as a voice.

We know the one. It lives in our heads, and it talks all day. Sometimes it is kind. But often it is hard on us. It says we should be further along than we are. It says we should have known better. It says, quietly, that we are not quite enough. Most of us have lived with that voice long enough that we think it is simply us. We think it is just the truth.

That voice came from somewhere, though it takes a while to see. It gathered its words early, from voices that were not ours. So it is something old. Old is not the same as true.

When we listen closely to that voice, to the words it uses and the tone underneath them, we may start to notice something. It sounds like someone. A parent who was tired and worried. A grown-up who was hard on everyone around them, especially themselves. A whole world that asked us to be smaller, quieter, better. The voice took its shape from the people and places we came up in, before we could choose.

So we can look at the voice plainly, and what we find in it is almost tender.

The strange thing is how little of it we chose. We did not sit down one day and decide to speak to ourselves this way. The words were given to us, and we kept saying them, long after the people who first said them were gone. We said them so often that they stopped seeming borrowed.

Once we hear them as borrowed, something loosens. They go quiet, not because we argue with them, but because we stop saying them.

So when the voice speaks, we can pause. We can hear it, the way we hear a song we did not put on. We can wonder where these words first came from, and whether we still wish to say them. Some of them, we no longer do.

In tenderness,
S. Marie
C U M I C H E