On the stories we tell ourselves

Listening to the voice inside my head

I read a statistic on Reddit the other day (I know) that claimed approximately 50-70% of people don’t have an inner monologue. (Citation needed).

Still, I was shocked. NO internal monologue? No constant voice in their head? Even if the true number was one person, it felt unimaginable to me.

I’ve always been a dreamy person. And I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a running play-by-play of my every move being vocalized just behind my eyes. Even when I read, I ‘hear’ all the words being said aloud in the voice that exists only inside me.

And this internal monologue isn’t linear. In fact, I’m most often daydreaming, fantasizing, imagining something or anything, this wild kaleidoscope of thoughts running parallel or counter to whatever I’m actually doing in the physical world. But each one has a distinct vocal cadence.

Sometimes the internal voice becomes external, like when I’ve dropped my phone for the 10th time that day, and manage to knock over 5 other objects while reaching down to pick it up. I will loudly exhort ‘Oh, Ruth’, frustrated with my clumsiness. The voice in my head turning critical enough to need to form words others can hear.

Most of the time though, I’m just weaving random thoughts together, creating little storylines that involve people in my day-to-day life, or folks who I will never likely meet.

But during the early part of Covid, when I spent months and months completely alone, the inner monologue became so loud that when I wasn’t working, or forcing myself to engage in Zoom wine chats or group movie ‘watches’ it threatened to overtake completely.

Up until then, I could easily distinguish when the self-critical commentary was heading towards dangerous territory, and reroute it with a fantasy or by calling up a favourite memory and ‘listening’ to it again, like a podcast.

Time spent only with myself weakened these coping mechanisms. The monologues become darker. The fantasies more intense. I imagined that the men who wronged me would call, or send long self-flagellating emails or texts, acknowledging their fault and begging for my forgiveness. Surely a global pandemic would make them realize they needed to make things right with me?

Over and over, I wrote and rewrote and refined these scripts. I heard them read out in intricate detail. The remorse, the sorrow. So real did they start to feel, that I was genuinely surprised when none of it came to fruition in real life. As it turned out, even Covid wasn’t enough to make a man who never cared that he hurt me in the first place become full of regret.

And I’m not sure what I really expected. The one time I did get one of these contrition-filled texts, from a man who was clearly in his cups and feelings at 3am, apologizing profusely for all he had done to hurt me, I felt strangely unmoved. He was so sorry for how things between us ended, when they didn’t ‘end’ so much as I showed up as his place for a party, and he was there with another woman. I’d long since moved on, basically never thought about him anymore. The acknowledgement that he sucked was nice in an abstract way, but I already knew that.

I think these fantasies were just another manifestation of my biggest fear - being forgotten. When I get upset at the length of time it takes someone to return a text, or when they don’t at all - it’s because I still have a desperate need to be seen as a person who exists outside of myself. The dark plotlines running through my head were really me worrying that only storylines I might feature in again were exclusively my own.

Now that I don’t need to be alone all the time anymore, I’ve become comfortable with it again. The voice in my head has retreated back to an unceasing but mostly harmless chatterbox who feels like a friend (most of the time). I enjoy taking long walks and using my inner monologue to work through a problem, or create an entertaining short film that wraps up as I get back to my door.

It’s still hard for me to understand how there are people out there with just quiet. I can’t quite figure out how it works. Even when I’m fully present with others, the inner monologue is there too.

So please know. When I spend time with you, and look at you with affection, the voice in my head is saying ‘thank you, I love you’ and we are smiling together.