Talk Alone (and Do It With Love)

Talking alone has long been a sign that a person is “sick in the head. ” I believe that all people do it to a greater or lesser extent, but who has not seen someone unknown having strange conversations out loud with anyone other than himself on the street and has been scared?

And it is that, like so many other signs of “madness”, that a person speaks alone often is a strategy of stabilization of all the triggered thoughts that run through our minds at full speed. Our heads.

But this time I would like to write about the tone in which we speak to each other. From the words we speak. The way we say them.

How we talk to ourselves

Because we are many people with psychiatric diagnoses, or simply people who go through episodes of psychological suffering, who are used to whipping ourselves for the slightest mistake and punishing ourselves through self-injurious behaviors. That is why the words we speak to ourselves are too often too harsh.

We are the severe teacher who punishes the students of our own minds with the stick. How many times do we tell ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, “you are not enough”? “No one is going to love you”? “Do you deserve all the bad that is happening to you”? Or simply “you’re a mess”?

But we are not disasters. And yes we are enough. And yes it is possible to love each other. And we don’t deserve anything that is happening to us; It simply happens to us, and like any other person we have to learn to manage our thoughts and our most complicated emotions too often from inexperience (since education in emotional intelligence is scarce).

So there came a time in my life when I just got tired of double torture. My suffering already tortured me, other people tortured me sometimes in one way or another, and I was not going to torture myself too. At least as long as he could find an alternative.

It was then, sometime in the middle of the emotional turmoil I found myself in after my first self-harm, in the middle of my first “more than friendship” relationship with another girl; when I began to speak to myself in a low, reassuring tone, like a mother cradling a crying baby. Like a friend who wishes you the best and accompanies you between hugs and consolations while the best is yet to come.

And I remember perfectly one night when I came home after meeting her, wrecked because I felt that it would never be enough for anyone. Because my panic of abandonment turned each farewell into a small tragedy. And I lay down on the bed, put on my headphones with a probably sad song in the background, and I started crying.

However, I also remember perfectly how I hugged myself. How I wrapped my torso in my own arms, and gently squeezed, and caressed my skin with my fingertips.

Because when I write about speaking to ourselves from love and forgiveness, I don’t just write it literally. I also refer to small physical gestures, such as kissing my shoulders, something that I have been doing for a few years when my whole body provokes greater or lesser disgust and I try to reconcile with it; With myself, after all.

Like spreading coconut-scented moisturizing lotion, my favorite scent, all over that body that’s been so abused (too often, by myself). Gently apply it to those surfaces of my skin covered with self-inflicted scars and feel that my body, in a show of mercy, not only forgives me but also gives me a new opportunity.

So since then, I talk to myself. I become a mother and a friend when necessary (as much as I have a mother and wonderful friends, at the end of the day the only one who has recovery on her hands is me).

I say to myself: “Sun, the pain will pass through you, and you will suffer it; but little by little, it will go away, like the water that runs down your body and ends up falling to the ground ”. I say to myself: “Sun, your body is a home, not a prison … and homes are taken care of.” I say to myself: “Sol, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay; and if it is not right now, it will be ”.

I say to myself: “Sun, you are valuable, just because you exist.” And until I believe it, even when I already do, I will keep repeating it to myself with a sweet voice and from affection ; in the bad moments.