The Lizard that Talks to Me (Part 1)

This blog is The Lizard that Talks to Me (Part 1). You will find The Lizard that Talks to Me (Part 2) here.

This week the Lizard that talks to me has been chatting away.  It comes when I am worried or when I am under pressure.  The more pressure or stress that I am under, the louder it gets.  It will wake me up at 2.30am, leaving me turning over and over in bed, almost begging it to shut up and leave me alone so that I can go back to sleep.  It’s the voice that is with me when I give up trying and sit drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits at 3am.  

I’m not sure when I first realised that this voice was there.  I remember growing up and having the talking in my head.  To be clear, the voice is my voice.  It is me talking to myself. As I’ve learnt more about it, I have taken to calling it the Lizard that talks to me but I didn’t always know what it was.  I didn’t think it was strange until my teenage years when you start to understand a bit more about mental health and the issues that teenagers might face.  When I began to understand a bit more about things like schizophrenia and personality disorders, the voice that I had babbling to me began to frighten me a bit.  

I recall asking my Mum if she had a voice in her head that talked to her.  ‘Well, of course I do’ came back the answer.  When I pressed her to find out if it was weird, she told me to stop being so silly.  Mental health wasn’t something she had time for.  We didn’t discuss it again.  I forgot about it and carried on growing up and hoping it was all normal.  

Having done poorly in my French GCSE exam, I was no longer able to do French ‘A’ Level.  This left me with two options that fitted into my timetable; Economics or Psychology.  I wasn’t that keen on either.  I thought that Economics would be boring and I thought Psychology would be a complete of a waste of time.  The only other people that were doing Psychology in my year were the flaky girls who wore too much make up and very short skirts.  It wasn’t me.  I remember being upset and annoyed that my plans had to change.  However, once I had started the course and we had got through the bits on Freud, the Ego and the Id and Jung and his pyramid (seriously, no idea what all that was about) I began to enjoy it.  

So, it was when I was about 17 that I finally found out what that the voice in my head had a real name.  It is called your inner monologue or internal dialogue.  I can remember feeling happy when I found this out.  At long last, a question that I had always wondered about was answered.  I talked to myself in my head and so did everyone else.  Hearing myself talk was not complete madness; it was real and it was ok.  Answering myself back probably was a little unusual but I could work on that.  Not only was I happy but I was also relieved.  Up until that point I had secretly wondered if there was something wrong with me.  Now I knew that there wasn’t.  

I finished my ‘A’ Levels and moved on.  I didn’t think about the voice inside my head much more.  It was enough for me to know that most people had an inner monologue and that I wasn’t entirely potty.  I continued into the world of work and didn’t give the endless chatter in my head much more thought.

Over the years, the more stressful the jobs were that I took on, the more I realised I was talking to myself a lot more in my head.  The majority of the things I was saying weren’t very nice.  They included questions such as ‘why are you so useless?’.  ‘What have you done that for?’.  I’d find me telling myself that I couldn’t do anything right, I was ugly, I was a massive failure, nothing would get any better and that it was all pretty pointless. Oh, and ‘you need to lose weight, be more adventurous, get out more, work harder, put in more hours,’ to boot.  And I’m just writing the clean, polite and unsweary versions of what I would be saying and then arguing with and then contradicting.  

I found that I could have a full blown squabble with myself all alone in an empty room.  Always when no one was looking of course. I was never going to let on that I did this.  I could go around in circles all on my own, either driving myself to anger or to tears.  Afterwards, I used to sit and wonder just how mad I was potentially becoming.

All the time, as the stress of everyday life increased, so did the voice in my head.  It was before kids came along.  I was in my very early thirties.  I was in yet another difficult job.  As part of that I was expected to get out and market my employer’s services and bring in work.  Some of this involved going out and ‘networking’.  Let me tell you, ‘networking’ is no fun.  You have to go out to meetings, have lunch/breakfast or drinks with people that you don’t know, be perky and polite and funny and desperately hope that you can take something positive back to your boss about the endless potential clients that you have made and how this is going to bring in a whole new income stream.  

Women’s networking is hard work.  You go off to a meeting and everyone cheerfully agrees that you are there to support each other, whilst wondering why the hell you have bothered.  However, it rarely brings any actual work.  Don’t get me wrong; I’ve made some really lovely friends this way but it was not all great.  It was at one of these meetings that I met a Life Coach.  

Now, we met lots of Life Coaches.  It was at a time in the early 2000’s when you couldn’t move at networking do’s for Accountants, Organic Beauty product sellers and Life Coaches.  I had big doubts about the Life Coaches.  They said they could change you.  The Life Coaches told us that they could make your life happy.  They said that with their help, you could have the life you dreamed of.  I smiled and nodded along, remaining completely sceptical and deciding not to hand over a well-earned few hundred pounds of my money to them.  

But there was one Life Coach who was kind and seemed very different and genuine.  So miserable and practically crippled by anxiety and depression as I was by the time I met her, that I decided to book a meeting and give this a go.  I figured I had nothing to lose anymore.  After telling her how dreadful I felt, she asked me about the voice in my head. What did I tell myself?  ‘Oh you mean my inner monologue’ I said proudly, trying to show off the little psychology I could remember.  It was the first time (since the days of trying to talk to my Mum) that I had admitted out loud that I had one.  It was also the first time that I admitted out loud to the awful way that I spoke to myself, fought with myself and generally spent most of my time insulting myself.

I laughed it off, telling the Life Coach that it didn’t mean anything.  It was just what I did.  But I think the Life Coach was appalled by how I had been treating myself for so long.  ‘If your best friend spoke to you that way, what would you do?’ she asked.  ‘If your husband told you any of this, what would you think?’  I’d honestly never considered it that way. Wasn’t this how everyone talked to themselves?  Apparently, it wasn’t.  So well practised had I become at belittling myself that I no longer recognised it for what it was.

I met with that Life Coach quite a bit and she taught me some very useful ways of coping with the voice in my head.  Eventually though, I had to stop seeing her.  I became pregnant with our boy and had other things to begin to worry about.  I will forever be grateful to her though for making me realise at that time exactly what I was doing to myself.

However, this is not the end of the story.  The voice in my head remains alive and well.  I still spend too much time arguing with it.  In Part 2 of this blog, I will tell you more about it and how I have since found out that it really is the Lizard that talks to me.

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