what makes us who we are | Mountain Girl at Heart

The voice inside my head, I should never listen to her. The voice inside my head tells me things like what do you know, or who do you think you are? You’re just an imposter. The voice inside my head is not kind. She rarely has a kind thing to say about the things I am doing or the person I am.

There is another voice though. The voice that I hear from outside of me. The voice we rarely hear is our own when it has been recorded and played back. The commentary from others who tell us that we do know what we are talking about and we are good at what we do. This voice is not the one we listen to as much as we ought to though.

I recently had a task to record myself interviewing others. The playback was astounding. Who was that voice coming from? Surely it wasn’t from me. That voice sounds confident, put together, informed. That voice sounds like someone who knows what she is doing. No, it couldn’t be mine. My voice doesn’t sound like that at all. My voice doesn’t have the confidence of this one. My voice sounds like a mouse, not like this one that I am hearing now. So I played it again. And again. And again.

Those were my words. I remember speaking them. Those were my lips moving, forming the syllables, pushing the air through my lips and creating the sounds I hear. How is it possible to sound one way in our own minds yet see and hear something so vastly different when it is on video?

Perhaps that inner voice doesn’t know what she is talking about after all. Perhaps that negative and condescending inner voice should have a seat for a while and let that confident outer voice take over instead.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people I come into contact with that have had tragedy in their history. People that you might never know had suffered losses or been through immense strain in their lives. Sometimes these people have been in my life for quite some time before the topic arises; others are still fairly new additions in my world. No matter how long it is, it never seems to fail that the most beautiful souls have hearts larger than life, and those are the ones who have suffered immeasurable loss in their personal lives. Somehow, they have managed to keep going and thrive despite the tragedy they have lived through.

We all have something in our past that has aided in making us who we are. Sometimes the heart-wrenching pain is what creates the most beauty in the end. The kindness, gentleness, soothing nature that seems to come so easily was birthed out of rugged pain and turmoil that tore its way from the inside out.

Beauty begotten out of the ugliness of pain.