Conversations

We never learned how to have productive internal conversations with ourselves. Our continuous daily inner dialogue will sometimes even carry on into our sleep, which not only ruins our rest but also day that follows.

The thoughts and conversations we have with ourselves are not as gracious and forgiving as those we have with friends, family, or even strangers. Conversations we have with ourselves are held to a higher - sometimes even unreachable - standard compared to the people we surround ourselves with. I am sad to say it can even go the other way: we can have no standards for who or what we are, and we crumble under the gaslighting of our own being.

The topic that normally comes up in conversations with myself revolves around the future and the past. The future and the past are in an almost eternal fight for my attention. In this fight, the past greets me with reminders that I have fallen short in all the challenges I have faced before, while the future takes these reminders of my failures and tells me that I am inadequate to prepare for—or complete—the challenges that will inevitably cross my path. The future and the past are working together to make sure the present never gets a seat at the table.

If thoughts of the future and past fail to grab us, entertainment will work its way into the equation. We become distracted by colours that never make pictures and sounds that never form a melody. We are drawn to the ingredients of great and meaningful art, but never get the satisfaction of seeing the finished product.

I don’t think we are in productive conversation with ourselves. We find ourselves in condemnation for failing to be someone no one even asked us to be. This is mainly because we assume that the way we are interacting with the world is what the world needs, never stepping back to take an objective look at what the world actually requires. We like to think we are making progress by the way we think and talk, but we are only creating another mannequin in a shop window. Dressed to impress the wallets of people we don't know, for fashion we don't like, in a world that doesn’t care.

If all of this is true (I hope it is not) then why do we entertain conversations that lead to our death? Death comes quicker than any of us plan, and if we spend our time daydreaming about the future and stumbling over the past just to entertain ourselves with nothing that matters, death will arrive even faster than we expect.

This is not the road I expected my thinking to take me on, but we ended up here:

I think any good conversation starts with reflecting on the conversations we have enjoyed. Then maybe - just maybe - looking at what we consume. Ideally, we would stay off social media.

I think a little more grace, with a little bit of self-accountability in our thought processes, is exactly what we need to start better conversations with ourselves.