WHAT ABOUT ME?
Micael
or as Rupaul says, your inner saboteur
"The mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master." — David Foster Wallace
The sentence I’ve started this edition with has been living in my head all week.
And I think that's fitting, given what it's actually about.
A while back, I read a book called Chatter — I've mentioned it in the second edition of tanamesa — and it introduced me to an idea that quietly changed something in how I relate to myself: you are not your mind. That voice that runs in the background all day, judging, predicting, catastrophising, replaying — it isn't you. It's just a voice. An automatic narrator that showed up uninvited and never really learned when to stop.
Here's the thing that still gets me: you can hear it, can't you? Which means you're not it. You're the one listening. The observer. The voice is in you, but it isn't you.
I've been having weeks lately where that voice hasn't been particularly kind. It's been noisy, restless, complaining — painting things in grey when, if I'm honest, my life right now has a lot of colour in it. Good things are happening. Real ones. And yet the voice doesn't always get that memo.
But that contrast — between what the voice is saying and what's actually true — has been one of the clearest reminders I've had in a while that I am not that voice. It's just visiting. Loudly, sometimes. But still just visiting.
The mind is an extraordinary tool when you're the one holding it. It can be creative, focused, generous, visionary. But the moment you forget you're supposed to be driving — the moment it takes the wheel — it can turn even a beautiful season into something that feels heavy and insufficient.
I don't think this is easy to practice. I'm certainly not claiming I've mastered it. But noticing the voice — just noticing, without immediately believing everything it says — already shifts something.
If any of this resonates, I really do recommend Chatter. It won't silence the voice. But it might help you stop mistaking it for the truth.
With love,
Micael.