That voice in your head?
It didn’t start with you.
It started with them.
The ones who told you to be careful.
To be quiet.
To be smaller.
To be less.
They didn’t say it outright.
They modeled it.
They loaded it into your nervous system like an operating system you never agreed to.
Now you call it discipline.
You call it realism.
You call it motivation.
But it’s none of those things.
It’s just an inherited voice with a new name.
The inner critic is a hand-me-down.
It sounds like you because you’ve repeated it so many times,
But it never belonged to you.
It came from the person who raised you on edge.
From the teacher who made your worth conditional.
From the system that taught you love is earned, not given.
You internalized their voice to stay safe.
And now you wear it like armor.
Except the armor turned inward.
Now it’s slicing you instead of protecting you.
You push yourself harder when you’re already hurting.
You shame yourself for not healing fast enough.
You whisper, “Do better,” when what you need is,
“Breathe.”
And the worst part?
You believe it.
Because it sounds like you.
It’s using your tone.
Your thoughts.
Your breath.
But here’s the truth:
If the voice in your head only shows up to correct,
Only speaks in fear,
Only knows how to punish—
That’s not you talking.
That’s a ghost.
And you’ve been letting it write your story.
You don’t have to argue with it.
You don’t have to defeat it.
You just have to stop mistaking it for yourself.
Because the real you?
They don’t speak in shame.
They don’t thrive on pressure.
They don’t need to be feared into evolving.
The real you knows how to move from clarity.
Not criticism.
From wholeness.
Not holes.
That voice in your head?
It was trained into you.
And anything trained…
Can be retrained.
