It's that little voice inside your head. It may belong to your mother, your father, a teacher, a lover, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, a child, even yourself. I've had that voice playing over and over for as long as I can remember. Nowadays it sounds remarkably like one of my children most of the time.
It's odd how you raise them, but don't want to lose their love or respect by showing off your feet of clay. Unfortunately, mine have seen that my feet haven't been on a pedestal since the beginning. It's kind of a bum rap when your mom is always having to make a choice between participating in your life with you, or being an absolute grouch who can't think or operate or keep the house clean, or hold down her job.
So those little voices in my head may have started out as echoes of my parents and things that my psyche probably didn't want them to have said. Or things I'd overheard supposed "friends" say when they were really being cruel to make themselves feel more powerful or somehow "better." Then it becomes the echoes of your lover, your husband and any bad or nasty fight you may have had when you were fighting in ways that couples aren't supposed to. Or the family members or friends you still respect that have hurt you and don't understand.
But as an older woman I'd have to say that the strongest voices I hear are those of my children. My son's voice echoing through the years asking his father if this hospital stay, "will take the mean out of Mommy." My daughter having to bravely make the choice of my company for an evening out or for the next day with the whole family because Mom doesn't have the energy to do two days in a row around multiple people and be, "on." And being jealous of other kids at her school hugging me and talking to me because I was HER Mommy.
I try to remember to tune the voices in my head to more positive channels nowadays, because the negative are self defeating and just feed on the chronic depression that goes along with chronic pain and chronic illness. There is so much about living with these kind of conditions that teaches you patience, and I'd have to call it almost mind games. There's an attitude of keeping on no matter what the pain or burden because giving up is not to be borne as long as one person you love is still around and you can smile, even in black humor, at one more thing. It's just the human sense of not giving up on life, I think.
Plus, after 23+ years of almost constant grinding, excruciating pain, I can say that it becomes background noise in your life eventually. You know it's there, and you want relief from it, and you really need relief from it, but there is never relief and you (or at least I) stop noticing so much. It interferes as much as it's going to and sets your "new normal," and then you go on. Heck, my blood pressure even DROPS nowadays when my pain is severe enough! How's that for Biofeedback? LOL
It IS a known condition, but with me it actually caused another problem and gave me a cute conundrum. Fainting. Like a Victorian maiden. I swoon. If I get into too much pain and my blood pressure plummets, I get orthostatic hypotension instead of the normal high blood pressure and if I change body positions or elevations too quickly my brain doesn't receive enough blood, and I pass out. Boom. For awhile all of our friends were trained to stop me from bending over because it had gotten to the ridiculous level. But now I'm just very aware of where my head is in relation to my heart and don't travel anywhere without my walker so I don't risk a fall on my head.
So we can always get used to it...somehow. :-)
