Mental Health: Whose Voice Is It?

My therapist asked me whose voice was in my head whenever I felt a rush of adrenaline and urgency, and without hesitation, I said, “It sounds like an angry man.”
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I’m pretty new to this whole existence thing, and it was a profound moment to recognize that my anxiety had a different voice from me. This entire time, my anxiety and I cohabitated without any boundaries. I took its word as prophecy, as truth, as law, without even questioning where it was coming from.

An angry man. His voice is unrelenting, loud, chaotic, and oppressive. It sounded a lot like some of the men I encountered in my life, ones who were careless, telling me what I was doing wrong while simultaneously gnawing at my every spark. They were afraid of my fire; they couldn’t handle the heat of my brilliance, so they extinguished it.

It’s ironic because men have played a central role in how I’ve digested my trauma. It wasn’t until very recently that the concept of de-centering men from my experience even came to me. Allowing the memories of these men to take up space in my psyche was another way of re-centering them in the narrative of my healing, and I’m sick of that. Even when they’re no longer here, they are still taking up space.

It also brought up the question of why the voice of women in my mind became silenced in the first place. I think it’s been challenging to cultivate that voice because I internalized the wounds of women who were also pressed under the thumbs of men — women who couldn’t leave, who couldn’t earn, who couldn’t be loved, who couldn’t be.

I’ve only ever seen women give, and maybe my inner world felt that was dangerous, so it didn’t internalize the voices of the women around me. The only way I could have survived with the voices of other women would have been by shrinking myself, and I just can’t do that.

Perhaps the entire lesson of getting older is learning to make my voice louder — so loud that it’s the only thing I can hear: my desires, my dreams, my passions, my joy.

I don’t sound like the women I’ve witnessed, nor can I obey the sound of the men who have hurt me. This voice I am cultivating is something new entirely, and I’ve just awoken to that fact. I’m meeting myself for the first time without any filter; this voice isn’t diluted or watered down. It’s clear and aligned and honest, even though it’s scared as fuck to take up space.

What would my anxiety sound like if it sounded more like me? If it could recognize the sound of its own voice? Maybe it would be less potent and would feel safe inside of me again. Maybe the reason I felt so dissociated from myself and so disconnected from my body was because the voices of others were inhabiting it. Rather than being a whole version of myself, I was fragments, pieces of everyone else.

I don’t want to be torn apart and made digestible anymore. I want to be difficult, confusing, intimidating — maybe even a little joyful — without pretending that I have to suffer or sacrifice myself to make the man in my mind love me.

Because the truth is, I don’t need him to love me. I already do.

It’s about living a life that looks like me, sounds like me, acts like me, and feels like me. Like slipping into a pair of jeans that fit so perfectly, you wear them every day — even when everyone else gets tired of seeing them.

​So if you see me wearing the same jeans everyday, now you know why.