Is It Loud in Here or is It Just Me?
Dealing with a noisy head space
Issue #38/ Welcome to Good and Beautiful Things, thanks so much for joining me in this space.
The other day our young adult daughter asked the family if we all have an inner monologue in our head. My reaction:
You mean some people don’t?
And then:
Is that an option someone forgot to tell me about?
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always had a crowd of voices in my head.1
///
Inside My Brain–Bike Ride #1
I set out on a bike ride with the first Fall weather of 2023. The temperature hovers between mid 50’s and low 60’s. I can’t paint a better blue sky than the one above me right now.
I click the play button and Maggie Smith begins telling me how I can Make This Place Beautiful.
It’s been a week since I took a bike ride so I’m curious what’s happening on my much traveled road. Is the Goldenrod still glowing? Are there new Autumn wildflowers joining the party?
I’m fairly new to Smith’s writing, so every few minutes I take a moment to appreciate her precise storytelling or the theatrical terms she’s using to frame her real-life story. For now, we are two women out on a bike ride on a lovely fall day.
That blue sky keeps making eyes at me and I smile at him so that he knows, that I know, that he’s beautiful. And what’s growing underneath my blue sky? It’s the field that only a few months ago was cut to the quick, leaving the shorn grass to wither in the heat. The dead grass has disappeared and new foliage a foot high frolics in the breeze.
Hello, old friend, I call to the field as I round the corner.
Smith has gone deeper into her story by now and without me realizing it consciously, her personal history starts pulling up roots of my own. She tells the story of how she met her first husband and a video begins to play of my courtship twenty-five years ago.
She talks about the challenges of birth and I see my twenty-three-year old self standing in the hospital room, screaming for my husband who’s in the hall talking to his mother on the phone.
Another voice jumps in: Could this memory be useful for your newsletter? The voice begins to compose potential sentences while the audiobook plays on.
Smith moves onto the soul crushing first days of being a mother and my soundtrack switches to familiar regrets about feeding schedules and leaving my infant crying.
The other voice gets louder, trying to be heard over the din: Is there a story in this for your newsletter?
Riding over a little bridge, I spot three deer wading in the shady creek. Whenever I see deer on a path, I think of something a friend once said. She told me that when she encounters deer on a walk, she believes it's God's way of communicating with her. I try to imagine these deer lost in thought about their past like I’ve been doing for the entire bike ride. I think instead they’re focused on the shady spot beneath the canopy of trees and the refreshing foot bath the creek has offered them. When I flip my phone to video mode so I can film the deer, the audiobook goes quiet.
In the silence, my vision clears and I’m reminded: Blue skies. Beautiful fields.
I breathe in and out and attempt to come back into my body.
As the quiet continues, I realize I will have to intentionally choose things that don’t add to the noise and that’s hard when it doesn’t take much to turn up the volume. Even good things (or great things, like Maggie Smith’s writing2 ) can hurl me out of my body and cause me to hover in my crowded head instead.
///
Notice and Redirect
I don’t have the answers of how to silence the voices in my head (or yours, for that matter). Instinct tells me that taking direct action against them would only ignite them further. My best luck has been in noticing and then gentle redirection.
I read a book about parenting or body image or spiritual issues and the message on my loudspeaker begins yapping: there is a right way to do this and you are not doing it right. Then I take notice of the noise and put the book down. Maybe it’s a better day for fiction.
Then there are times when I’m tempted to put a podcast on to quench my spongy, curious brain but the voices are already at max volume. I actually love the curious part of myself but it’s wise to recognize when more information isn’t what I need. Maybe instead of that interesting episode about grief3, I choose the one about the latest Survivor season instead. Offer my brain a little chill time.
I know the solution won’t be found in making a rule book for myself or reading someone else’s. It’s about checking in to see what I need at the moment and trusting myself to make the shift. (Or not. Sometimes I get it wrong. Or I don’t notice until the noise is deafening.)
///
Making a Shift–Fall Bike Ride Number 2
Yesterday, I took another bike ride and I put on a playlist of music.4 I find that bike rides are a time when music works with my brain instead of against it. Instead of competing with my thoughts and tasks, it joins with the movement of the bicycle and offers my thoughts a soft focus.
It was later in the day and a little cooler than the day before. I said hello to my field of toddler grasses and then stopped because the path was blocked by bikers and walkers standing completely still. Ten feet from them stood my three deer, quietly enjoying the field.
The voice tried to butt in: Is there a story in this scene? You could write about…
I answer back: Shhhhhh.
I turned my mind back to the music and my body back to the Fall air and the beauty that still awaited me on the path ahead.
///
Here’s a poem that came out of my weekend bike rides and my attempt to make peace with my noisy brain:
A Tangled Mess
My mind
is a magpie’s nest
bits collected and stuck on
with saliva and sweat
a quote here, a memory
there, the vine from
around my mailbox.
One might think
it’s a tangled mess
of trinkets and trash,
not worth a second glance.
In truth it’s a home,
where art and ideas
are born.
In Case You Missed It
Check out the sketchbook page I created to illustrate the poem above.
Kicking Pressure to the Curb
Issue 8/ Welcome to Creative Possibilities, a midweek issue of my Good and Beautiful Things newsletter. This newsletter offers a glimpse of what’s on my art desk as well as stories from my creative life that I hope will encourage or inspire your own.
If you’d like to support the writing and art that I create for this newsletter, you can now contribute to my art supply fund through “Buy me a Coffee”!
Blessings from the Guest Nest,
-Aimee
P.S.—I’d love to hear what calms the noise in your head.
The conversation got even more interesting when she asked if the voice in our head sounds like our own voice. There were some surprising answers.
Because Smith’s book is, indeed, great writing. If it wasn’t great, it wouldn’t have been such a distraction!
Okay, but this episode with Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert is so good. At the right time.
Music is a tough. For me, music can sound like a toddler banging on a drum, it adds to the noise and derails my attempts to concentrate on a task. For my husband music layered over conversations and work sessions somehow calms and centers his brain. I turn the volume down, he turns it up. He turns it on, I hide the speaker. (But when the task is to ride a bike ride and there are no other human voices, music works for me.)
I really enjoy your bike rides sketches, and the photos too. It’s a nice way to travel with you and follow your creative journey.
I was somewhat flabbergasted when I learned that not everyone has this same busy brained internal dialogue! I find that the more I can try to give compassionate attention without freaking out, the quieter things stay. Quite honestly managing all the mental noise feels an awful lot like parenting my own children - walking that line of attention and reassurance without falling down into neurotic anxiety or obsessing that makes everything worse. Can you co-regulate internally? I don’t know but I hope so 😅… Sometimes I think I’m the most difficult child of the bunch.