I think most of us have voices in our heads — not the alien ones that require tinfoil to keep out but kind of ordinary voices giving advice (or less politely, nagging). Sometimes it’s like a running background commentary on what you’re doing. Or even on what you’re thinking.
One of my friends always talks about picking out clothes and hearing her mother in her head saying things like “you’re too big to wear plaid” or “no one wears white shoes in winter.” Her mother was really into fashion advice. Other mothers tend to have favorite topics of their own. I assume that mothers are so often stuck in your head because they’re the ones who spent hours talking to you, instructing you, and in some cases yelling at you.
Luckily for me, my mother is not the voice in my head. Sure I can remember a few pieces of advice she gave me, but it’s not the kind of advice I’d repeat here. No, the voices in my head are other people and they tend to shift from one phase of my life to another. Sometimes they’re people I admire and am close to — the things they say tend to stick with me.
Sometimes the voices are left over from teachers. During a particularly rocky period in my life I took Tai Chi classes. Those classes were one of the things I could count on, an anchor to get through the week. So even now I can hear that instructor in my head saying “relax, and sink.” That’s pretty good advice for stressful situations — the sink part meaning not so much sink to the bottom of the pond but lower your center of gravity, become more stable.
Often that background voice is a stream-of-consciousness, James-Joycean kind of narrator with lots of description and maybe not enough focus. That’s the voice that makes me turn on some alternative conversation. Driving alone on long car trips requires an external voice from radio or recordings. Sleepless nights definitely need an audio distraction — and not just people yelling outside in the park.
Sometimes the internal narrator is creating a story — which leads me to believe I’ve written something when in reality it was only narrated in my head and never made it to computer or paper. A lot of blog posts vanish into that mist.
Over the last few months I’ve noticed that the internal narrator has changed slightly. It’s often not quite as rambling (although there’s still plenty of that) and the lines are shorter. Then I realized that the description is now 140-character blurbs. Who says Twitter has no influence.
