Both voices in your inner conflict sound exactly like you
You already know the argument by heart. One voice says, "I should be over this by now." Another answers, "I will never get over this." The first voice is impatient. The second is despairing. Both speak in the first person. Each sounds entirely familiar. This is an inner conflict, seen from the inside.
Your two voices rarely arrive as words alone. One comes as heat in your face. The other comes as a heaviness behind your eyes. On some days, the pair drowns out everything else. On other days, it murmurs under your conversations.
Such a pair often goes back to childhood. Only its topic ever changes. Stay or leave, speak up or keep quiet, forgive or never forgive: the form remains the same. You have tried, many times, to settle the matter for good. Yet both voices say "I". Naturally, you assume that one of them must be the real you. All you have left to decide is which one.
There is a stranger possibility (and a gentler one): neither of them is you.
Most advice says healing means choosing the right side
Advice on healing has reached you many times already. Trust your gut, listen to your heart, silence your inner critic. The slogans vary, but the instruction never changes: find the wiser voice, and back it with everything you have. Then starve the other one.
(Sometimes the advice works — for a week or two.)
The trouble begins the moment you pick one voice. You are no longer hearing the argument — you have joined it. Now you are one of its two parties. Meanwhile, the voice you overruled does not leave. It waits for a tired evening, and then it speaks again, word for word. So you push your chosen side a little harder, and the cycle repeats. Each repetition leaves you more tired, and more confused about which voice was wise. Eventually, you blame yourself for lacking discipline. Nobody tells you the plan itself was the problem.
Choosing, it turns out, keeps your conflict alive.
There is another option. A young Greek soldier found it, in far harsher circumstances.
Renos Apostolidis swore he would write rather than shoot
In June 1947, the Greek National Army called up an Athenian of twenty-three. He was studying history and archaeology. Greece was in the middle of its civil war. He served until December 1949.
His name was Renos Apostolidis. During those years, he made himself a private vow.
He would not fire a single bullet. And he would record everything he lived through. He scribbled notes on empty cigarette boxes and in notebooks. Then he turned them into letters to his mother. The letters ran to roughly five thousand pages. In October 1950, less than a year after his discharge, they became a book: Pyramid 67.
The book ridicules the war. It strips the ideals of each camp bare. One reviewer praises its complete distance from both sides' ideologies. A scholar later called it "a liminal testimony" — the account of someone standing on the threshold. Apostolidis belonged to one side by uniform, and to neither side by conscience.
Pyramid 67 is still in print in Greek, though I found no English translation.
Each side of you is yours, yet you are neither
Back to your own two voices: they did not come from nowhere. One often carries a parent's caution. The other carries an old hurt, or an old hope. They grew in you, out of your own history. They even speak in your accent. The despairing voice borrows your memories. The impatient one borrows your ambitions.
An earlier piece on this blog said that both sides were yours from the start. That sentence still stands. Now it needs its second half.
Your accent belongs to you. Still, nobody would mistake you for an accent. The same applies to your two voices. Each one belongs to you, and neither one is what you are. A voice can move you, and you can obey it. You are never the voice itself.
(Try, for one moment, to be only the despairing voice — you will find yourself hearing it instead.) The shift from being a voice to hearing one takes no effort at all.
For years, I worked by day and wrote by night
For a long stretch, I was two people at once. One of them was a model employee inside a large financial institution. The other had always known that life is far stranger than it looks.
I could not stand fully behind either of them. Instead, I did what seemed reasonable. I split the difference. The institution had my days. The writing had my nights and weekends. The arrangement worked for a while — and only for a while.
You can read the longer story of those years on my About page.
Then my body began paying for both lives at once. My sleep was seriously hampered first. After that, my weight went the wrong way. By the end, flattening anxiety and quiet desperation filled most of my waking hours. Both halves of my life were running at full output. And neither one was the decisively true one.
I had not chosen a side. I had tried to serve both, and serving both nearly broke me.
You can watch both sides of you without taking either
So what remains, once you stop obeying one voice and stop serving both? What remains is whatever has been hearing them all along.
The next time your two voices start talking, you need not answer them. Let the despairing one speak. Let the impatient one reply. Feel the heat in your face, or the weight behind your eyes. Do not decide what they mean. You can breathe out and leave the verdict open. Your part is small: watch them, and stay where you can hear them. Your awareness is already hearing both. It has no opinion of its own.
It is not a third voice, arguing more wisely than the other two. It is simply the place that hears them. Nothing in that place needs fixing.
A post two weeks ago asked you to spot who is aware of reading these words. Whatever was aware then is aware of your two voices now. It never joined one side. It never needed to. (Or is that too neat? Check it for yourself, rather than taking it on trust.)
Walt Whitman knew his moods were not the Me myself
An American poet described the same listener almost a century before Apostolidis. In 1855, Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. It held twelve poems. He later titled the first and longest one Song of Myself.
In that poem, he lists what visits him day after day. The latest news comes, and so do his dinners and illnesses. So do his "depressions or exaltations". "They come to me days and nights and go from me again," he writes. "But they are not the Me myself."
"The Me myself" is his odd, capitalised name for the self the moods visit. Whitman does not silence his moods. He does not obey them either.
Further on, Whitman pictures that self "both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it". Your own two voices belong among his visitors. They are moods too, only louder and far more persuasive. Penguin still prints that first 1855 edition, with its original twelve poems.
(The same poem admits that Whitman contains multitudes. Somehow, they never cancel the self that watches them.)
Your two voices can continue without you joining in
Whitman's way spares you two jobs: silencing the despairing voice and persuading the impatient one. It does not require you to heal first, either. Your unhealed wound is your strength, and you can act from it today.
Your voices will go on talking for a long while. You can let both finish their sentences. What shifts is the place you listen from.
Apostolidis could not stop what was happening around him. Yet he could keep writing to his mother. Your two voices will not fall silent on request, and nobody asks them to. You can, however, listen to both without doing what either one says. When your argument starts up, hear it out. Treat it like two strangers talking on a train. Neither stranger is you. You need not settle their quarrel before your stop.
Heard this way, your own argument even turns faintly funny. (Not always, of course. Some evenings it is not funny at all.)
Some days, I side with one of my two voices
Not every day finds me listening this way. My health anxiety speaks with great authority. Its voice sounds exactly like mine. Some evenings, I take its side before I notice. On those evenings, I am a party to the argument again, not its listener. Noticing comes later, sometimes much later — and, so far, it has always come.
When I notice, the anxiety keeps talking. I simply hear it, instead of being it.
Apostolidis went on writing for more than fifty years. Whitman went on revising his poem until he died. Each of them left open the question of who he was. I do not expect to close mine.
I am consciously caught between two voices myself. So, I've become able to see and tell you where you are stuck before you can even name it.
Tonight, your two voices will speak up again. Neither of them has ever heard the other — only you hear both.