The Things She Felt

Voices in her head

In every person, there is a voice that speaks to you, speaks for you. It is the reason why you can think and why you can speak. It exists in all different tones and behaviour. Sometimes, its kind. It comforts you and insist that the words you've spoken earlier didn't mean a thing. Sometimes, it' disapproving, telling you that you are going to make the same mistake that you are hating yourself for if you go ahead and read another 100k book. But most of the time, it's hateful. Listen to them whisper. Surely they are talking about how ugly your stuttering was. Look at yourself in the mirror. You can call yourself pretty? It's terrible, having to hear all these thoughts in your own head repeated over and over. At first, you tell yourself, no this cant be right. I'm better than to be bullied by my own imagination. But as time passes, and the same words keep replaying in your head, doubt starts to creep in. Will my friends talk behind my back? Do I really look so plain? Until one day, you've believed in them all. Because what's the truth and what's the lie anymore when the voice inside your head all sound the same? So your head begin to fill with unimaginable evil. Get rid of yourself. You are just a waste of space. Uninteresting, boring, unwanted. Why don't you just kill yourself?

The first time you have that thought, you freeze. Shock spreads across your body and for a moment, you stop breathing. What? With a racing heart, you drop your head into your hands and massaged your temples. Stop it. You are exaggerating. It isn't all that bad. You breathe in. Let's try to get better.

So for a few days, your mood took a 180 degrees turn. The nasty thoughts disappear and all you can feel again is encouragement, hope, motivation. Precious feelings you have not felt for a Long time. You cherish them and bask in how they make you feel alive, feel normal. How was I living without them? How can i ever keep them? But slowly, as desperately as you try to cling to them, these feelings slipped away, leaving you with an empty hole in your heart. Sadness, fear, hopelessness crept back in and filled that void. Funny, why does the emptiness only seem to get larger?

It's a vicious cycle. You'll be so down for months, before having a week of reprise, but in the end, without fail, everything comes crumbling down again. It's like building a house of cards in a windy place. You build and rebuild and sometimes when the wind cease, you manage to get somewhere, but you never reach the top before everything topples again. And each time you start anew, your will to try again decreases. In the end, you give up. There is no point.

But you have to keep living. Even though it hurts, you cant. You need to continue living, for the sake of your family, for the sake of God. Not like you want to kill yourself anyway. The world is too beautiful to leave. So you do the one thing you haven't tried before. You shut the voice inside your head.

Its terribly difficult at the start. These thoughts that pushed you to crave physical pain to relief yourself of the emotional ones, they are not so easy to push away. A whole battle ensues in your head. Who will take control? The voice of reason, or the voice of evil? They fight and battle, and your body is just a vessel. You become drained and emotionless and you start pushing everyone away. Its just so tiring to be around endless chatter, around joy when all you want to do is drown in misery. Why cant they understand?

Eventually, the small voice of reason emerge victorious, with the voice of evil kept as prisoner in the deepest dungeons of your brain. But this voice is badly wounded and can barely stand on its own. Yet, it has to keep going, to command the body. No time for healing, when the world around the body is already in chaos, or at least as chaotic as it can be, hidden under the pretence of mundane every day life. So, broken and bruised, you continue on with your life. No one to disturb you in your head, no one to jeer and judge you. But why don't you feel happy?

You live your life, going through the process of lifestyle, but everything now feels blank. There are no words to describe it, except that you lived life like it is a fact. Straightforward and taken without any judgement. Only understanding that it is what it is. Accepting, without any feelings. That's what life is to you now. Just hard, cold facts. And you are so emotionless, you cant even feel empathy, something you used to excel in. You used to feel so strongly against killing spiders (they are so cute! Plus, they help control the breeding of ants and other pesky pests), and now you cant even understand the implications behind your friend's story. It becomes tiring to communicate, when emotions are all pretend to you now. When you just cannot connect with other people. Sometimes, you can put up an act so well that it starts to feel real. But after a while, talking is unbearable. After all, whatever you were doing was artificial. It feels like you can live without any human interaction at all. In fact, the idea sounds so inviting to you, only the mere impossibility of the idea is holding you back.

To say it hurts, is a lie. Because, as we all know by now, you don't feel anything at all. The voice in your head, it quietened down so much that you are left with a vacuum in your head. Words become jumbled, sentences become unraveled. And you are left with another problem. You cant speak. You are left grasping passing words and forcing them into whatever little you remember of sentence structures. Everything you say now is incoherent at worse. At best? Boring. Its so frustrating. You try so hard but no one wants to entertain a robot. You are in despair. Your close friends are slowly slipping away and you cant hold on to them, you refuse to, because you know you'd do the same if you were in their shoes. This much, you understand. And you are so trapped.

It didn't occur to you until so much later, that what you've been missing all along was your other voice. Because though it can be cruel and hateful, it is the one that allows you to feel and connect. It's the one that sympathise, that's passionate and funny. And its not there anymore. You try to coax it out, but this one feels much betrayal. It's not so willing anymore to take charge. Besides, its action is what leads you to feel so much pain. Even you are reluctant to face it. But you know you need to, and slowly you try.