The Voices in My Head
I’m grateful for an inky black morning. I’m grateful for seeing what is. I’m grateful for coffee outings and strategery in the park. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Here’s the setting: It was earlier this week and I was on a mission near Bryant Park. The mission: Get some walking and thinking done, while simultaneously searching for the proper cookie and coffee combination. I will tell you, for a city that likes to boast about having literally everything available, finding a place that has both good coffee and good cookies—-well, you have your unicorns and I have mine.
This mission thus requires conducting transactions in two separate retail establishments and I come to grips with the reality that I may face the thing that could literally be the end of all of us: The way coffee ordering is done. I feel like you can probably guess how I drink my coffee, and when I have a fancy drink, it’s a skim cortado. That’s it. Someone wrote recently that there are like 5 billion potential combinations on the Starbucks menu and that the endless choices are slowly strangling Starbucks—driving up service times and expenses at the same time.
Anyway, not even close to our point. I’m also having to navigate the herds of tourists that are omnipresent. Do I greatly fear the opening of the ice rink at Bryant Park? Yes, I do. I have the music blasting like always and weaving in and out of the slow-moving and phone-staring crowds, O.J.-style.1 I may have been getting annoyed, and then the Great Spirit that Inhabits Spotify recommends this gem. And now I’ve been listening to this all week.
The super-funky intro is sneaky, it doesn’t sound that much like a Stevie Wonder song at first. The words are kind of garbled—audio production in 1972 wasn’t so great—but here’s the gist of it. This guy has this girlfriend and he would really like to see her and then he calls and she doesn’t answer and then he stews about it for a while and feels worse and then he gets this realization, this shot of reality, delivered by one of the back-up singers, and it’s deadly:
Maybe your baby done made some other plans.
I know that feeling, you know that feeling. The moment when you realize that you’ve been ignoring what’s been in front of you for a while. You’ve constructed an alternate reality from the the scattered clues, told yourself a story about what all of those slightly-troubling things really added up to. Not allowing yourself to believe the thing that is true, while convincing yourself that this other lie is the truth.
It’s always some small detail that triggers the collapse of the carefully constructed artifice of self-deception; the way a tiny hole can collapse a dam. There’s that icy-cold feeling in the stomach, the tightening of the throat, the acceleration of the heartbeat, you suddenly know exactly what’s up. That’s this moment, in this song:
Maybe your baby done made some other plans.
I heard that, and while it is not applicable to my current day-to-day, I felt it like it was happening to me. I love the fact that the bad news is delivered by the back-up singers. It made me think about Homeric Sirens, sweet songs luring sailors to their death, but this wasn’t really a sweet song. This is kind of a snarky, semi-cruel song, and then I realized, I like it because it’s very much like the voice in my head.
I’m assuming we all have that, right? That voice that runs in the background, commenting on the goings-on of the day, wondering about stuff, day dreaming even. Or, if it’s like mine, there’s also a lot of judging, criticizing, reminding of lost opportunities and other catastrophes, remonstrances about work habits and personal life. When I make references to the hamster wheel, that’s actually a benign description—the real one in my head has horrible screeching voices attached a lot of the time—like the fierce Bene Gesserit whispering in Dune.
Ok, that might be a touch over-dramatic, but you get the idea. I’ve had that voice with me for a long, long time. When we moved over and over when I was a kid and I didn’t have friends, the voice told me that it was because I was nerdy and awkward. The voice told me I didn’t work hard enough, that my dreams and aspirations were ridiculous. The voice asked me who was I to think I could be entitled to much of anything? The voice suggested there was comeuppance in the future and when it came to pass, it would be only me who could be blamed.
The voice was pretty merciless and mocking, it seemed to relish pointing out the consequences of my many flaws. The mistake I did make, that did have long-lasting consequences was that I assumed that voice was me.
During the many, many years of my recovery, I started to realize there were other voices in there, too. When I delivered the Des Moines Register in the mid-1970s, the voice that accompanied my 5:30am jaunt through the neighborhood was cheerful and funny and tried to imagine what was going on in the darkened houses we passed, hoping the collies would be out in the yard of the house at the corner of Highland and Koser, wondering about the future, what I could be, what I could do, how I might live. That was a friendly, sweet and authentic voice.
The other voice, the mean one, liked to point out how ridiculous that all was and how much ridicule I would be subjected to if I let that kind of nonsense come out of my mouth in a way that others might hear. Then I would know exactly what kind of outcast and loser I really was. I don’t know where this came from, I do know that I kind of recognized the duality inside for a long time, without realizing the absurdity of it, or the cost of it.
I know I’m not the only one who struggles with this. It gets talked about all the time at meetings, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just confined to alcoholics. For the record, I started noticing the malevolent voice long before I began to drink. But is that malevolent voice connected to my drinking? Ummmmm yes?
Of course it is. That was sarcastic. And speaking of sarcastic, the next episode of Breakfast with an Alcoholic is close at hand and simply requires just a bit more editing. This means you should do two things immediately in preparation:
and then:
Just trust me on this. When you’re listening to Episode 2, you’ll get to this spot and you’ll realize just how clever this all is. Or ridiculous. Here’s the problem: Sometimes the mean voice is correct. That gives the mean voice more power, more authority. For me, the mean voice was also always the “should” voice, and it was also the voice that fueled my sense of wrong, that I deserved more, was entitled to more. If this voice was a person, I would definitely not want to hang out with them.
And that’s kind of the answer, I stopped hanging out with that guy. When he showed up in my head I watched him and what he said and thought and then tried to understand where that came from. It didn’t take too much time examining my thoughts to begin to see that this voice spoke largely out of fear. The most significant of those fears was that I was failing to find my proper place in the world, that I was overlooked and lost.
At the bottom, it was the common fear of being lost, of being an imposter, of failing, of being ridiculed and humiliated. None of those are unique or original feelings, the difference for me was the level to which I allowed those feelings to drive my actions, my life and my view of myself.
I write a lot about the element of rediscovery involved in recovery; for me, it was really a process of finding myself, recovering the version of myself that had been lost. When I think back, the process of getting sober is a little like the opening scene of The Terminator, when Arnold arrives naked in the parking lot. I felt stripped bare, everything had finally been exposed. I’m not sure if I can describe the next part of my recovery as being comparable to Arnold going into the bar, kicking some ass and stealing clothes and a motorcycle. But sort of like that.
The point is, the moment the Terminator is kneeling and naked in that parking lot is also the moment of re-discovery and re-invention. It’s the moment his life of purpose and service begins (he does proceed to save mankind and then selflessly give his own machine life to secure that future). An important part of that re-invention and re-discovery is the integration of the voices. The fact is that all of my voices come from different parts of me, different sets of experiences at different times and different situations. But they’re me.
I had to push all of the voices together and put them into this closet-type space to accommodate a much bigger and more important thought. There could be no serenity in my life until I accepted that every person, place, thing or situation was “exactly the way it [was] supposed to be at this moment.” (Big Book, p. 417).
My voices may quarrel a bit, but they mostly get along. They fortunately share the same sense of humor and have similar tastes in music. The bad voice is not bad per se, they just bought into a worldview that brings pain, heartache and chaos. The bad voice believed in a world where I was missing out, where I was being left behind, not being valued or respected or appreciated. The bad voice drove my resentments, made me distrust other people, made me angry at them and at me.
The bad voice didn’t realize that I was right where I was supposed to be. All along. It took an awful lot for me to see that simple fact: I’m placed where I’m supposed to be. I have no idea about the “why” part—that’s why one lives one’s life from day to day, why they play the games, as the saying goes. To see what happens next, and then accept that glorious moment and then the next one after that.
IRL, I get kidded for these beliefs I express on Friday mornings, they are a bit rosy-eyed and gee whizzy sometimes. Except I think they are all completely f****** true. The people and things that are meant for me, can’t be avoided; that every day is an opportunity for gratitude and learning and growth; that life presents challenges that all have the same answer (it’s love); and that the things that are supposed to happen, generally do happen.
I’ve been sober for five years believing those things. Even the bad voice has nothing to say about that.
Happy Friday.
The only murder is in my heart.