Inside voices

The little voice inside me is a mercurial fella prone to extended, unwanted monologues on parallel parking (front first, please? Who are you, some kind of aristocratic valet?), abstruse baseball statistics, and multi-level sandwiches. The kind of tiered food that makes Ponzi artists and architects stand in awe, mouths agape, salivating for more than an uptick in their sodium intake. Like a trusty faucet, I can turn off the little man easily, but never completely. He’s reluctant to surrender without a fight. The fear, and it’s a legitimate one, is that once he’s silenced, I’ll forget about him, moving on to solitary adventures, hoarding all the credit for myself. Without pestering me, he ceases to exist. Luckily for him, I realize his value and despite obvious obstinance, he remains inside, whimpering, whispering, endlessly meddling with my affairs. And if you must know, while faceless, he is hardly nameless. I call him Guy du Monde. Or, “guy of the world” in the original French.

Although, sometimes I pray I could shut him off and up. It’s not easy and it’s not happening any time soon. If he’s reading this, God help me. God help us all.

To turn the little man off requires contacting the Super and disrupting everyone else in the building. While the loudest and most demonstrative, he is not alone within the wild confines of my mind. Since my psyche is pre-war (don’t ask how, given that my birth year is well after WWII), there are plenty of entrenched, ornery tenants who love the geyser-like water pressure in their rent control palaces. 

Eviction is understandably a non-starter. I use the little man to my advantage, throwing him under the bus in meetings and brainstorms. I don’t have bad ideas. But the little man? He’s practically made of them. By employing this tactic, I’m liberated from ever producing good work. It’s not my problem, really. Blame the little man works every time. 

Of late, my little voice is harder and harder to understand. I think he’s speaking Welsh right now. I don’t speak Welsh, so seeing eye to eye, something we once did effortlessly like long lost brain brothers, is a thing of the distant past. 

Don’t just listen passively to your little voice, jotting down the occasional note to placate them. Talk back, no matter how it makes you look. You’re not starting the conversation, merely taking control of it. He or she will yap away whether you like it or not. So you might as well listen. Meet halfway and discuss things in the open for all to see and hear. They can judge, but that won’t get them far. They have voices too, ones that are yelling at them from inside a crowded cranium.

Keeping your little voice on the inside is understandable during a Broadway show or Broadway bris, but outside the bright lights of Theatre Row, it makes little sense. They have nowhere else to go but out.

Because one day you may be someone’s little voice. Someone’s Guy du Monde.