The voice

by Jon Sullivan - 2024-10-22 - Jonism

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For the last few years I've been constantly happy. Mostly.

For most of my life, before sobering up a few years ago, I was a pretty bad alcoholic. I suspect one of the things that made me that way was the constant voice in my head that filled my waking life with nasty thoughts. "You are lazy. You are a failure. You are ugly. You are an asshole. You've given up on everything you've ever tried. No one wants to be around you." I remember this voice from my earliest memories as a child. Some of it was not untrue, but even the tiniest fault would be amplified. As a child I didn't know it was even happening, it was just how being a person was, as far as I knew. And into adulthood, when it became obvious I couldn't act "normal", I just embraced who I assumed I truly was - An asshole who couldn't do anything right. These days I would have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and treated. The voices of doctors would be there to perhaps drown out the inner voice of shame. But back then I was just a fuck up.

At some point I discovered alcohol and found that if I drank enough the voice would completely go away. And I'd be happy. Or at least what I thought was happiness. But..... of course..... it was fucked up happiness. I didn't know any better. When you are filled with shame and self loathing your whole life it's easy to see any reduction in that as happiness. Is that true? I don't really know. But I do know that getting black out drunk kept the worst of the thoughts, the suicidal ones, from killing me. There were a few people who helped, people who liked me or loved me. But even with them I felt like a failure much of the time. So I drank, a lot, every day. And pretended I was happy. Pretended that being drunk made me happy. Because of that fucking non-stop evil voice.

We all know the story. A few years ago I went crazy and stopped drinking and started feeling happiness for the first time. This new crazy me didn't have the voice at all. All of the shame and self loathing faded away. Drinking may have saved me in my 20s, but at 60 it was sobriety that finally let me be the happy person I could have been all along.

These days the voice is gone. Which is why I am somewhere between happy and joyous every day. Every. Day.

Mostly.

A few weeks ago the voice came back. "You are fat. You are lazy. You are a fraud. Hide at home. Avoid people because that's the only way you can stop being a disappointment." It snuck up on me without me realizing. Just a whisper, but it was enough. Enough to make me very unhappy for the first time in years. I went to a concert that I should have loved, but I hated it. Friends wandered by to chat but I couldn't. The fucking voice.

The next day I lay in bed and argued with myself. I knew how to be happy. So where was it? How had I lost it? Could I get it back? Or had the few years of joy been all I was ever going to get? I applied Stoicism and logic, and just simply turned the voice off. Am I fat? Sure. Am I lazy? Sure. Do I fail? Sure. But my happiness, my joy, does not rely on me being beautiful, or having constant wins, or being forever free of mistakes. My happiness derives from easy things I truly love doing - Kindness, virtue, friendship, simple pleasures. There will always be struggles and pain. But being ashamed will not help that even a tiny bit. Believing I'm a failure makes it easy to never fix anything. And I'm about fixing these days. So I replace shame with the knowledge that people really like me, and I bring beauty to the world, and I try to be kind to a fault. And that is enough. And it's more real and productive than that fucking voice ever will be.

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