I, probably like you, have an inner voice. I sense it more than I hear it, and I know it’s my inner voice because I don’t ever “hear” it telling me anything, I just “know” what it’s saying. Usually, it keeps me full up on self deprecating chatter, razor sharp and often hilarious judgements, and that everlasting reminder that as hard as I work at everything I do I’ll never be enough.

I’d always figured that when I got around to hearing actual voices, they would be the Smeagol sorts of voices that encouraged me to press someone’s head into a belt sander, fuck a dead animal, or chop off my own foot because it itched.

As it turns out, it seems that I have taken to hearing the voices of people around me complimenting me.

It’s happened twice in the last week, and I pretended not to hear it. I’ll be in the kitchen and think I just overheard part of a personal conversation in the living room that I wasn’t supposed to be privy to.

I started wondering if these things were actually happening, just had a little bit of a sense about it you know? Like in dreams, my name is never used. And it’s a one-liner type thing, something that can be interpreted as being about how awesome I am but isn’t blatant, such as “I love doing this with her”. And at one time, in 2001 or so, I would dream so vividly about it being the day I was transitioning into sleep from that I would think conversations I’d dreamed that night were real the day after.

It took a little while (and a boatload of fucking balls, honestly) to ask someone who could tell me if these things were actually being said aloud. They weren’t, but asking did open up a lovely conversation about the possibility of thought transference and the concept that I might be picking up on them. I think that’s possible and I’ve had experiences that caused me to wonder if I have a keen sense in the past, but that would ultimately really surprise me.

What wouldn’t surprise me, is if I feel on some level that I need to externalize self-focused positive thoughts, being as uncomfortable with thinking well of myself as I am. Worse yet is my discomfort in assuming anyone else thinks well of me, and that’s the trick I seem to be playing on myself, which in my deviant little world makes perfect sense.

There’s also the age old (for me) threesome factor, as both of these situations involved two people conversing together in agreement of how much they appreciate me.

Maybe this is how self esteem shows up for me? Or maybe it’s happening because validation and acceptance from the important people in my life is so important to me and so hard to articulate or ask for, letalone truly accept. Or maybe all this self love over feeding myself good food and resting and focusing on my health shorted my brain out, like that one time in 1999 when I was high on E and I heard groups of people whispering praises to me as I wandered around the club.

I suspect this is something akin to the time period in 2008 when I would wake from a vivid dream, sit up, see both my dream and my actual surroundings, and lose the dream image only when I tried to touch it and shattered my depth perception. My brain is pretty.. well.. awesome, and keeps me entertained, and finds amazing ways to cope with stress and trauma, which I had in spades in 2008 and now.

In all honesty, I would be a lot more comfortable with being able to read minds than I am at the thought of projecting fake compliments onto myself. Telling another human being I thought I might be doing that was not easy. And if my life has taught me fucking anything about this internal examination shit, it’s that the least comfortable option is probably it, sadly.

I guess I’ll continue to ignore the lottery for now.