Voices, Voices
I find it hard to face my demons when the worst ones are the voices in my head.
Content Warning: This piece contains mentions of substance use, violence and self-harm, and suicidal ideation, as well as explicit descriptions of mental illness.
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I’m sitting against a concrete pillar, camera in hand, thoughts and plans rushing through my mind as the hour ticks by. I’m in the middle of coverage for a protest at Stata, and I'm eyeing the two police officers monitoring the event.
I just came back from a six-hour shift at work, 6 a.m. through noon, and I’m exhausted as all hell—but I feel great; exhilarated even. I’m running on about three hours of sleep, and damn am I running fast. For now, I’m an observer: a fly on the wall. Flies don’t have feelings; the only thing that can be on my mind right now is the story. I’m piecing together threads, I’m drafting up the article in my head, and I’m preparing outreach for about fifteen other articles-in-progress. Today has felt really, really good. I want to keep it that way.
My mind is racing, but for a second, a very very terrifying second, I freeze up. Does what I’m doing actually matter?
(What do you mean?)
Well I don’t—you know, what am I even doing here? Life is going to go on whether or not I write about it. Am I just wasting my time sitting here capturing every single thing?
(People care. You know they do.)
But that makes me feel worse. What if I let them down? What if I’m just lying to myself that what I’m doing is actually good?
(How would you let anybody down?)
Well, it’s just—there’s just too much I need to do. I’m falling behind, and there’s just too much to do.
(Okay, I want you to repeat after me.) Okay.
(“I’m in control.”) I’m in control.
(Say it again.) I—I am in control.
I am, right? (Yes, you are.)
Are you lying to me? (Yes, I am.)
My mind is racing, and for a second it stumbles, but it catches itself and keeps on racing. Why face my demons when I could just keep running away from them? If I tell myself that I’m “good enough” enough times, doesn’t that make it true? (I’m not sure that’s how it works.)
I think that maybe what I’m doing is okay. I think that it’s good. I really do. But am I actually doing good if I have to convince myself of that every single day?
A single crack begins to form—my pillar of self-identity wasn’t designed with stability in mind, was it?
I try to shake it off. The only thing on my mind right now—that can be on my mind right now—is the story.
Butterflies in my stomach. Or was the expression about a “pit”? (Pit in your stomach?) Was it even about a stomach or another organ? Am I misremembering the idiom completely? (Did you just fully make this all up?)
Ecstasy, frenzy, excitement—fear, anxiety, fright—delirium, zeal, dread. They all head the same way. One second I feel absolutely fantastic, and the next I feel sick to my core.
Oh lord, if I can’t even remember this one little thing right, how should I be expected to do everything else? How can I trust myself to do anything else? (You can’t.)
I am filled, then, with the uncontrollable urge to lie down on the floor and curl in my legs and just sit there, breathing rapidly, and painfully, and fearfully. My veins feel like they’re on fire, and the world is spinning, and—
—wait, focus back to the story, the officers are talking with the protestors and they—
—and I find the word: panic. I’m having a panic attack; I’m having a panic attack; I’m. Having. A. Panic. Attack. Someone help me, please help me, I’m having a panic attack.
I can feel my heart uncomfortably sitting in my chest, and I want to tear it out. It’s beating hard, and it’s beating fast. My chest hurts.
The voice in my head snarls: “You think you deserve help?” Her first sentence is barely a whisper.
“No, pity is all you can get.” Her second is ignored.
“Pity from me, pity from the people walking past you, pity from yourself.” Her third echoes in my head long after it’s uttered.
Some small and shrinking part of me is asking, begging to try and keep going with the story. It will all be okay, she says, if you just don’t think about it. Don’t think about it; just think about the story. This is more important than you. Focus on what actually matters. (Don’t listen to her.)
But I can’t help but listen to the first voice in my head; she’s louder than the others, scarier than the others, and she’s saying “jump.” (Don’t listen to her either.)
The other one, the smaller one, tells me, worry about it later. Pay attention to what people will actually care about. (I don’t know that “Nobody would bat an eye if I lived or died” is much better than what the other one is saying.)
And I feel terrified; I feel alone. I’m sitting against a column set in the middle of a very wide hallway, on that bench right in between 32-124 and 32-141, and I feel f**king terrified. I’m on an island in the midst of an invisible sea, impassably separating me from any remote chance of help. The people walking past me are just a few feet away, and somehow we’re leagues apart.
A Penelope Scott song comes on, and I panic: no, no, no, I can’t do this right now, I can’t think about—oh, how easy it would be to—no, I can’t—but this is a campus, surely there are scissors somewhere—but I don’t want to—but you do—but I don’t—why not?—because I—it’s what you deserve, isn’t it?—no it isn’t, no it isn’t, I—what value do you have to anyone here?—I—who would miss you when you’re gone?
(See: Music Listening, another column from “An Ellie For Your Thoughts.”)
This is a textbook spiral.
And I just can’t take it anymore, and I run.
I escape out to the edges of campus and I frantically search my backpack for—aha! I snag a cigarette and light it and huff—once, twice, thrice—and close my eyes and collapse against a tree.
For a second, I dangle the cigarette an inch from my skin. I want to stub it out on my wrist so I don’t feel anything else but the pain.
My mind is racing, but not in a good way. I’m not good enough. (Is there anything you could ever do that would convince yourself of your worth?) I’m not worth caring about. “What is there for anybody to care about?” I’m crumbling under the weight of it all. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I’m sitting against a shady tree, cigarette in hand, sheer panic rushing through my mind as the seconds tick by. I’m in the middle of Hockfield Court, and I’m looking out into the farthest depths of space.
I clutch my stomach and I just stop thinking. For a brief second, all the voices in my head stop.
And I finally have a moment to breathe.
The voices in my head, at times, feel like some of my worst demons made manifest. They puppet my every move, and feed me the thoughts I am supposed to have.
They are my pride. [Damn, I am gorgeous.]
[If I make enough money, I can pay for anything I want.] My greed.
My lust. [Is she free tonight?]
[Why can’t I be as good as—] My envy.
My gluttony. [Wine and lobster for dinner!]
[I really, really want to punch a wall right now.] My wrath.
And my sloth. [I can’t even bring myself to get out of bed.]
And when they say “Jump,” I don’t even bother anymore to ask how high—I just resign myself to it with a “Yes, ma’am.”
About an hour and a half later, I find myself at therapy. How fortunate that my next session with my therapist just happened to be today. The office is sanitized, clean, pure; it is plastic yet polite, and I welcome the controlled, quasi-ordinary environment the therapist’s office creates. We talk about mood swings, substance use, and panic attacks. We talk about what I need to do to finally be happy.
At therapy, I felt alright, and I felt regulated. It was nice to have someone to talk to. My comings and goings of ecstasy, fear, and delirium felt, for a passing moment, actually okay: they felt manageable.
What we didn’t talk about was how the voices in my head made what should be day-by-day—and hell, hour-by-hour—segments I could quickly move on from become immovable weights I’m perpetually burdened with.
I remember when I sat in the back corner of the Banana Lounge with a spreadsheet of my major plan open, frozen in fear for hours. I watched the rays of sun that eked past the buildings behind me creep across the room and eventually dwindle away. The voices in my head were in council, with no one to leave until the matter was debated and done with. The last item on their agenda was to vote on the current iteration of my to-be curriculum. Arrogance was heading a bill to scrap it all and start from scratch; anxiety feared the consequences of changing course this late into my college years. Only when it was dark and cold outside did the meeting finally adjourn.
I remember when a walk along the esplanade brought me to tears. One second I felt all fired up as the voices in my head told me of all that I had in my power to do, of all the ways I could finally be good enough. It only took one voice to comment on the dream’s impossibility, and the faint gust of wind it made was enough to knock me off my perch and bring me back down to my own personal hell.
And I remember when, on one unassuming Wednesday evening, an unexpected internal feedback loop and one too many shots supercharged a normally brief wave of self-hate into a dissociative typhoon of warring voices that ran well into the night. The pressure and stress broke me into a spiral of deep depression, abject horror, and self-persecution as I lost touch with “Ellie.” March 13th was the night that my demons came to face me. And I did not win.
And so the day after, and after, and after, it is the exact same story: the voices in my head have total control over me. They always choose the path of destruction, the winding road to self-loathing. Each day, I reprimand myself for just existing; and every day, I am made to build myself back up in preparation for another self-inflicted assault on what life I have left.
This is endemic to the story of Ellie Montemayor. What more glorious purpose is there to behold than the all-consuming act of eternal war with oneself?
Exhaustedly, I thrust the immense boulder of a life’s worth of agony up a terrible mountain. Relief and optimism take over as I reach the crest, hoping against fate for an end to the cruelty. It’s only momentary, and once again the boulder careens back down to rock bottom. Then anger, depression, and finally acceptance. The eyes of all the world pound at my dwindling will as I undertake my senseless, ceaseless task. Sometimes, I fear that in my efforts the mountain itself may crumble from the endless battering.
Up on this ephemeral mountain, my mind is entombed in the walls of a great and crumbling castle. Within it, the voices in my head take the form of my worst enemies, my lost loved ones, my greatest fears. They are the evils that keep me up at night.
Worst of all, they take the form of the one demon I’ve never had the guts to face: me.
As I write the final paragraphs of this piece, I feel a sense of pride in what I’ve accomplished. These 2000-something words took weeks to hack together, a process made all the more burdensome as I doggedly traverse through the crevices of my mind palace in search of the demons that haunt me.
(What voices?)
Their mocking jeers, their piercing cackling, their many attempts at bringing me to my knees echo off the empty halls of my mind palace.
As I invoke their names, the voices multiply. One—two—three–five–ten.
“You think we’re voices?”
I whip around at the sound of it and hold up a torch to the enveloping darkness. I am journeying through the forgotten passageways that lead into my darkest secrets and the nightmares left behind, all restrained in boarded-up chambers that I’m deathly afraid to reopen.
They come from the cracks when I least expect them, when I am most vulnerable to their ambush. The easiest thing to do is to ignore them.
/We don’t “come” from anywhere, my dear./
[We’ve been here the whole time.]
Ignoring them doesn’t usually work, and after the first half-hour or so I would start to break and give in. I’m not doing that now.
(We’ve been watching you.)
Laughing at you.
I clench my fist as they try to overpower me.
[Every single mistake—]
/—that you’ve ever made.../
I venture deeper through dust and debris, pushing away cobwebs as I brace myself.
We remember it all.
“And we can’t wait to see your next one.”
(Tick, tock.)
My mind is racing, but I don’t let it get to me. I close my eyes, and I take a deep breath.
The voices in my head are here to stay, but so am I.
I suppose we’ll just have to learn to live with each other.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.