That nasty voice – that mean voice – the one that tells you you’re not good enough. The one that says you don’t deserve to be happy or to have all the things you say you want.

Whose voice is that?

I so want it to be someone else’s.

Then I would just need to forgive them and move on.

But I know that voice. And I know that it’s mine.

Maybe it started out in someone else’s mouth, but I heard it and swallowed it up, because I believed it was true. I’d just been waiting for someone else to notice it.

That’s why the mean voice hurts so much – it knows us so well and it knows how and where to hurt us, because it IS us.

It’s hard to accept that.

It hurts to realise I’m hurting myself.

That I’m the one gripping too tightly.

That I’m the one who needs to forgive and be forgiven in order to move on.

That I’m the one who is more comfortable in pain than I am in joy.

It’s easier to listen to my “inner critic” than dare trust my inner wisdom. She could let me down, but inner critic will always be “cruel to be kind”, and there’s an odd sort of comfort in that cruelty, in knowing where you stand.

We become more attached to our pain than we are willing to admit to ourselves, let alone anyone else. We begin to enjoy the struggle, because it’s easier than daring to do something different. We begin to believe we have no choice, because it starts to feel like that’s true.

But, thankfully, it isn’t.

Because the wonderful thing about it being OUR voice is that WE get to decide what it says. Or, if that feels too difficult, we at least get to decide its volume, or how much time we spend listening to it, or even introduce other voices, like our inner wisdom, our inner cheerleader or our intuition – whatever you want to call it, you get to choose.

We all get to choose.

What do you choose?

This piece is inspired by Esther Zimmer’s Sacred Page journalling e-course – click here to read more about it and sign up for yourself.