I was recently asked to talk about my inner voice and what it feels like.
Ironically, I rarely think explicitly about the voice in my head. Other than to recognise I have one. Apparently not everyone does. For those who don’t experience themselves this way, it’s important to understand, no one talks to me. Imaginary people don’t appear. I hear my thoughts, lots of them, spoken concurrently. And it can get noisy in there.
At its worst, the voice is the opposite of some benign companion, guiding me through the travails of life. Instead he’s an unrelenting gob-shite, filling every space in my head the way water fills a glass. An opinionated, vociferous, belligerent noise maker, that never ever shuts the-fuck up!
If you could hear the monologues behind my eyes, they would sound like traffic tearing up a multi-lane highway. A mega-road spiralling infinitely inward, forever chasing the end to Mandelbrot’s fractal. Cars and lorries, trucks and vans, wefting and warping at deafening speeds.
That’s what I wake up to. My status quo. The baseline noise in my head. And because that’s just how it is for me, the best I can do is put it to work. Construct a narrative? All done! Find me a patterns in the chaos? No problem! Create connections between absurdities? There you go! Now imagine all of that multiplied by ten, twenty, a million.
When things are going well and I keep busy, it’s manageable. When it’s not, when the wheels inevitably come off, it’s a car crash. Any unexpected question, that catches me off-guard, will feel like a herd of buffalo charging into traffic. Vehicles brake! Tyres skid! Unforgiving metal mashes unyielding flesh! It’s carnage. Nonsense speaks. None sensical words choke the voice. No lanes. No direction. Just thoughts and emotions mangled together with nowhere to go but… it’s as visceral and violent as an actual car crash.
If I was a science experiment, it would be beautiful, a miracle of physics. Particles colliding, unraveling some fundamental truth about the universe. But there’s nothing profound coming out of this particle accelerator. When my thoughts collide they create fission not fusion. Things get smashed not created. And the inevitable consequence of exploding fission. Tonnes of toxic waste on everything inside me.
When inertia is everything, collisions are catastrophic.
On the edge of catastrophe. That’s my head. It reads hyperbolic. Even romantic. But romanticism is torture for financial gain. Grist to the mill for the parasites of romantic pain. That’s not me. For me it’s like watching the penny drop, on my head. A machine, stamp! Tightropes and knife edges don’t mean the same things, when they’re ploughing face first into you. You did this. Your brain did this to you. You hate yourself because there’s no one else to blame. The shame. Shame on you for being that fragile. For being that dumb. For not knowing! How do you master a weakness you can’t control?
Blunder blind into any shadow and the hole in your head will glow.
When the deluge of cortisol floods the tarmac you’re forced to choose. Fight or flight? Flee or stand your ground? I will always fight! I don’t know why. Generational trauma? Tough ancestors made hard by tough lives? Who really knows? But come at me the wrong way and I will fight you!
The flip side of fighting is vigilance. Hyper vigilance. Life in a state of expectation. Reading the road. Knowing. One step ahead. Anticipating. If this. Then that. When speeding thoughts connect with that charging buffalo it gets dark, barking, myopic madness. It’s not anger. It’s panic. A chest tightening sickness that starves reason. Waiting for the moment, you have to fight!
It’s never calm before the storm, only after the disaster.
The aftermath of disaster is silence. Thoughts choke on internal combustion. Mandelbrot’s patterns burned to dust. Leaving a hole that’s blacker than absent. And a silence that’s worse than the noise. The quiet is arrest without charges. Until nothing takes hold of everything. Dragging mayhem over the edge. Letting carnage fall off the horizon. Waiting for rubber to taste the edge. Zang tumb tuuum, gears bite the rim. Zang tumb tuuum, engines growl at silence. Zang tumb tuuum, thoughts weft and warp. Noise shattering the silence, so that inner opposite can return to square one.
Darrin // Nightingale 