The Voice

Have you ever listened to the conversation you have with yourself all day? Don't tell me you don't talk to yourself- we all do it. I was astonished at the incredible number of negative comments I say to myself about myself during the day. If you have ever kept up with this, you may have noticed the same trend. I am constantly talking to myself and it's not all good. Some of it is so terribly random, I hate to even admit it but, to make my point, I will, in fact, share some of my recent conversations with myself.

Me to Me upon waking and looking in the mirror: Oh your hair this morning is just wild and look at all those grays!

Me to Me at Cheekwood on one of the first “flip-flop”days of spring: Look how big and spread out your toes look in those flip-flops! Hers are so cute over there, but yours look like a beast! And your toenail polish! Why didn’t you take that ugly color off?

Me to Me on running at the park this morning: I wonder if that mother over there thinks you are crazy to be so big and trying to run. I am sure she thinks you should just be walking. Even if you want to run, you shouldn’t be running. You are simply too big. Only small, running kind of people run in the park.

Just writing those comments makes my stomach turn. When did I get to be my own enemy? When did I become that person that can’t see the pretty in me or the good? I only look for the icky parts to point out- I’m too big, too wide, too curly, too everything of the bad stuff. Do we do that to make ourselves feel better somehow? Surely not. Do we do that to make ourselves realize we're not “good” and need to keep working on ourselves? And while my comments I mentioned were about my appearance, they could just as easily be about my parenting skills, my career, or other similar avenues. Geneen Roth writes about this attack we take on ourselves in her book Women, Food, and God. She writes, “Although the very notion that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to relaxation is absolutely insane, we hypnotize ourselves into believing that the end justifies the means.” She goes on to say, “We treat our bodies as if they are the enemy and the only acceptable outcome is annihilation. Our deeply ingrained belief is that hatred and torture work. And although I’ve never met anyone- not one person- for whom warring with their bodies led to long-lasting change, we continue to believe that with a little more self-disgust, we’ll prevail.”

It makes complete sense, doesn’t it? How could any good come of beating ourselves up everyday from the time we wake up until the time we rest our tired heads on our pillows at night? The only reason I even admit to this is that I know other women and men do this too.

So…what to do? Well I am trying to take stock of that “voice” in me. I’m becoming aware of that voice in me that is so incredibly destructive. When I hear it sneaking into my head, I try to hear it but not let it get me. In fact, I try to counter it with something positive. I know I have positive things to share with myself. We all do. They are in us, just as much as that ugly voice. So when I see my wild curls in the mirror, I think of my oldest daughter’s same kind of curls and the absolute beauty I see when I look at her. We share this trait and it is lovely. I want to be aware of the good in me. I know I can.

Roth writes so eloquently on this subject. “Either you are willing to believe in kindness or you aren’t. Either you are willing to believe in the basic sanity of your being or you aren’t. To be given wings, you’ve got to be willing to believe that you were put on this earth for more than your endless attempts to lose the same thirty pounds three hundred times for eighty years. And that goodness and loveliness are possible, even in something as mundane as what you put in your mouth for breakfast. Beginning now.”