I think a lot about internal voices. Probably because I grew up with a mother who heard voices in her head.
She was so upset to hear voices that didn’t belong to her taking up residence inside her jurisdiction, her property.
At first, she thought these voices were in the room with her, so she went from place to place, then from town to town trying to flee them. But the voices followed wherever she went.
That’s when she realized they must have been inside her brain. That the government must have implanted a chip.
She called it The Program.
And she felt that the purpose of this program was to punish her for not going along with The Program at large.
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It can be so easy to dismiss someone who hears voices as mentally ill.
But when I looked deeply at my mother’s situation, I began to see that her problem was actually everyone’s problem.
It was only bc of her particular internal and external circumstances, that the problem manifested more on the surface of her life, rather than lying dormant as it tends to for most of us.
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Similar to my mother, I also like to think of my mind as my jurisdiction.
I like to imagine that this head of mine is a great fortress, a barrier around my mind, to keep away intruders and their dangerous ways.
After all, this space inside my head is the place where I live, the place where I’m having this experience of being alive.
But when I examine the situation more deeply, I realize that our minds are not exactly local inside our heads.
When I look deeper, I notice that my mind is not only a home for my experiences and what I’ve made them mean over time, my mind is also a mirror, a recorder, a time machine, a projector, a museum curated by everyone who has ever been here before, and a community garden that has been planted from seeds cultivated by the whole entire world since the beginning of time.
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My mother grew up bombarded by authoritarian voices. Voices that told her who she was supposed to be and what she was supposed to do, voices that her parents had inherited from their parents and their parents before that.
But my mother did not want to go along with their program.
My mother had a mind of her own, as they say, and the program that her adults were trying to force upon her simply didn’t fit who she knew herself to be. And this created a lot of conflict.
Thoughout history, when people refuse to go along with the program they were born into, first there are conflicts, then ultimatums, and if they still don’t comply, they often find themselves banished from their tribes.
Maybe today, getting banished doesn’t look the way it once did—some guy trekking through some desert with just the shirt on his back, past the outskirts of town to lands unknown.
But make no mistake—people still get banished.
Every time my mother did things her way, love was withheld.
“How could you be my child?!”
Or she was shamed through labels: “We’re sending you to a psychiatrist! Something’s not right with you!”
Punishments meant to shame her into submission so she’d stop the madness and get with the program already.
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For whatever reason, some kids operate well inside the programs they’re born into.
And for whatever reason, other kids don’t.
We humans really are born with different traits.
My mother was born with brown hair, brown eyes, and a program of her own that operated best in the world as creative, wild and free.
If my mother had been born into a family running her kind of program, she might have thrived and gone on to create a life that matched who she was.
But my mother’s program didn’t match the program of her environment.
And instead of submitting, my mother’s spirit insisted on doing things her way.
She skipped school, bc she hated it.
She changed the grades on her report card bc she knew she was brilliant.
She shoplifted the things she wanted, bc the clothes her mother bought didn’t fit her soul.
When she wanted to be a flight attendant and my grandmother forced her into college, my mother swiped her roommate’s checkbook, took herself to the department store for a fancy new dress and then out to a fancy dinner and to see jazz afterwards.
She was kicked out of college, did her community service at a hospital where she met my married father who divorced his wife and proposed—which was the very first time my mother experienced the feeling of being wanted—and so she said yes.
And her mother called right away to offer her congratulations: “You’ve finally done well. You married a doctor. I’m so very proud of you!”
But my mother wasn’t happy. At all. She knew in her heart that she didn’t want to go along with this same old program.
And so, a few years later, she took me and we left.
And, everyone stopped speaking to her.
But even so, she held her head high and ventured out on her own, into the unknown, toward life on her own terms.
But, as many people find out, it’s hard to escape The Program. The Supposed-To-Be’s.
Because the program isn’t just running in the houses of our families of origin.
In fact, if you look around, it’s pretty easy to find The Program gazing down at you wherever you happen to be, making sure you’re being who you’re supposed to be, and judging you if you’re not: at the grocery store, the doctor’s office, hospital, school, workspace, etc.
And in my mother’s case, those supposed-to-be‘s spoke very clearly:
“A woman is not supposed to be successful without a man.”
“A woman is supposed to know her place and do what’s she’s supposed to do.”
Or, “I’m so sorry but you are supposed to have qualifications to be a contribution in this organization. And those qualifications are supposed be approved by other qualified organizations. And you have none of the above.”
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My mother was turned away from every opportunity she tried to seize.
But she didn’t give up. She continued trying to enroll people with her natural talents, her natural skills:
“Trust me. I have wonderful ideas! I can make a difference here!”
But no one took her seriously.
And in time, my mother began to do what so many of us begin to do. She began to meld all the ‘no’s’ she was currently receiving with all those ‘no’s’ she had already received from her childhood, and interpreted them all the same way:
“You're so very arrogant to think you have better ideas.”
“Who do you think you are anyway?”
“You’re a divorced woman. You failed at your marriage. You’re not wanted here.”
“See? Your mother was right about you.”
She tried so hard to ignore those voices from that old program. She continued her search for a break, for some access to the life she knew she deserved, but no one let her in.
And so she remained stuck on the outskirts, running out of money, running out of time, trying to parent me, and all with zero support.
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As years continued on, years of defeat after defeat, those voices, those supposed-to-be’s grew increasingly louder.
But she still refused to believe those voices were hers. And still refused to believe that what they were saying was true.
That’s when she came to the conclusion that those voices must have been coming from The Grand Authority figure of them all: The Government.
The government must have been punishing her, just as her parents had, for not going along with The Program.
She didn’t understand the specifics of the government’s program, but in her mind, it was clear that someone from the FBI had picked her as the perfect candidate to monitor and punish her—for going against the old program and imagining she could create a new one.
So yes, my mother got paranoid.
But who could blame her?
What other reason could there have been for why nobody was letting her access a life where she could be free to be herself?
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What my mother didn’t have, was the awareness to understand what The Program really was.
Not a program set up in some office in Quantico.
It was something more organic.
Something not ‘implanted’ but ‘planted’ in the collective minds all over the world: the seeds of the supposed-to-be’s.
And the most important thing to know about these seeds is that they’re not planted to intentionally harm people by keeping them out. They’re planted to protect the people thriving inside.
They’re the seeds that declare unanimously that the supposed-to-be’s are in fact what’s supposed to be.
And the way these seeds travel is via the winds of agreement.
They blow like pollen all over the globe and begin sprouting and growing in minds everywhere, and if they’re not recognized for what they are, their growth can suffocate the natural growth of what we’ve planted in our own gardens.
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It’s hard enough to keep nurturing our own natural growth on a good day. But next to impossible to be our true selves if we’re in survival mode, trying to find the means to survive in a world that doesn’t seem to give a shit about our survival, all while hearing these messages judging who we are, and feeling so sorry for us that we just didn’t have what it takes to be who we were supposed to be.
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My mother’s problems didn’t begin when she heard voices.
Her problems began because she didn’t have a mentor, a wise person to help her understand where all these voices were coming from.
And her problems got worse when she couldn’t handle the sound of the voices anymore and started to self-medicate to drown them out.
And her problems got worse still when she lost everything, wound up on the street, and got treated like garbage, which only affirmed her paranoia that people wanted her to fail as her punishment for having the audacity to think she had the right to live a life based on who she was, instead of who she wasn’t.
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I am who I am today bc of what my mother went through. And I only wish I’d learned what I now understand while my mother was still alive.
And what I’ve learned is this:
When you hear voices in your head that aren’t yours, voices telling you who you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to do, instead of listening—pause, and remember—that these voices aren’t speaking to you personally.
What you’re picking up are just the sound waves from that old radio station that’s been broadcasting for eons, Station WSTB, Supposed To Be Radio, where the voices of who you’re supposed to be share their opinions all. day. long.
But guess what? You don’t have to listen. You can make your own sound waves, by broadcasting your own voice, by sharing what’s meaningful to you based on who you’ve chosen to be through your own set of values.
You won’t be a guest on that old station. You’ll be creating a new station. And people will tune in. And be glad they did.
We cannot keep ourselves separate from the world, bc the world is inside of ourselves.
But we can choose who to be and where to stand and put our efforts into creating the kinds of environments that are a match for who we are.
We’re living in exciting times where new voices are being heard. And new environments are being created where more people can be a contribution and thrive doing what they feel they were born to do and be who they feel they were born to be.
And new seeds are blowing through the winds. Not so much through agreement, but through permission, permission to be free to be ourselves.
And these seeds of permission and encouragement are growing hearty in the minds of more and more people.
And of course, some people who have operated well inside those old programs might be nervous. And it makes sense. They might not want any new seeds growing inside the gardens in the jurisdictions of their own minds.
But I think with a little flexibility, they might come around and realize the benefit of having diverse gardens in the world. Gardens where people with every trait imaginable get to grow. Because gardens that are diverse are the most hearty, and keep us all operating at our highest potential as we share this planet together.
-JLK
