Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #1

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IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here.

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There’s a voice in my head.

Actually, that’s not accurate. There are several. And if you’re reading this, I’d bet good money you have them too — you’ve just never said it out loud because it sounds a little crazy when you do.

Here’s what I mean.

There’s the voice that wakes me up at 2am and starts replaying a conversation from three days ago, pointing out everything I said wrong. There’s the one that shows up right before I have to do something hard and whispers you’re not ready for this. There’s the one that watches me succeed at something and immediately asks yeah, but how long before they figure out you’re faking it?

And then — and this is the part people don’t talk about enough — there’s the voice that’s occasionally, frustratingly, right.

That’s where it gets complicated.

The Voice That Lies

Let me start with the one that causes the most damage, because I lived by it for a long time without ever questioning whether it actually knew what it was talking about.

This voice is confident. It doesn’t hedge. It doesn’t say maybe or I think — it states things like facts.

You’re too much.

Nobody actually wants to hear this from you.

You’ve already screwed this up, you just don’t know it yet.

Other people manage this stuff fine. What’s wrong with you?

With ADHD, this voice gets extra airtime. Because when your brain works the way mine does, you have a lot of evidence to work with. Forgotten appointments. Half-finished projects. The thing you said in the meeting that came out completely wrong. The way you can hyperfocus on something for six hours and then not be able to remember to pay a bill. The voice collects all of it, builds a case, and presents it to you on a loop.

And when you’re young and you don’t have language for any of this — when nobody’s told you that your brain is just wired differently, not broken — you believe it. You believe you are the problem. Not the environment. Not the mismatch between how your mind works and what the world expects from it.

You.

I believed that voice for years. Decades, honestly. And the damage it did wasn’t loud or dramatic — it was slow and quiet. It was the opportunities I didn’t take because I pre-rejected myself before anyone else could. It was the relationships I held people at arm’s length in because I figured they’d eventually see what the voice already knew. It was the exhaustion of performing “normal” every single day while underneath I was working twice as hard just to keep up.

That voice wasn’t protecting me. It was just mean. And I had mistaken it for truth.

The Voice That’s Actually Trying to Help

Here’s the thing though — not all of the noise is a lie.

There’s another voice. Quieter. Easier to miss. And it says things I didn’t want to hear either, but for completely different reasons.

You need to slow down.

This isn’t working and you know it.

You owe that person an apology.

You’ve been running on empty for months. Something’s going to break.

That voice, I ignored just as much — maybe more. Because listening to it meant doing something uncomfortable. It meant admitting I was struggling when I was supposed to be the one who had it together. It meant asking for help. It meant stopping, and I didn’t know how to stop.

The tricky, maddening thing about the voices in your head is that they can sound identical. The one that’s tearing you down and the one that’s trying to protect you can show up in the same tone, at the same hour, in the same exhausted moment. Learning to tell them apart is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do — and I’m still not perfect at it.

But I’ve gotten better. And the difference between then and now is that I at least ask the question now: is this voice telling me the truth, or is it just afraid?

Fear masquerades as wisdom all the time. It says don’t try that when what it means is I don’t want to get hurt. It says you can’t do this when what it means is this is hard and hard things are scary. Once you start to see the fear underneath the certainty, the voice loses some of its power.

Not all of it. But some.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

I wish someone had pulled me aside when I was 20 — or 30, or honestly even 40 — and said this clearly:

The voice in your head is not a narrator. It’s not objective. It’s not the final word on who you are or what you’re capable of. It’s a product of everything you’ve experienced, everything you’ve been told, every time someone made you feel like you were too much or not enough. It has a perspective. It has blind spots. And it is absolutely allowed to be wrong.

You are allowed to question it.

You’re also allowed to tell it to shut up.

That’s not denial. That’s not toxic positivity. That’s just you being in charge of your own head instead of the other way around.

The other thing I wish I’d known: you’re not the only one with this going on. The person sitting across from you at the meeting, looking completely composed? They’ve got a voice too. The friend who seems like they have everything figured out? Voice. The leader you admire who seems untouchable? Voice. Probably a loud one.

We are all, every single one of us, having a running argument with ourselves. Most of us just never say so.

So What Do You Do With It?

I’m not going to give you a five-step plan. That’s not what this is.

But I will say this: the first move is just noticing. Not fixing, not fighting — just noticing. Oh, there’s that voice again. What’s it saying? Is that actually true?

That small pause — that tiny gap between the thought and believing it — is where everything changes. It’s where you stop being a passenger in your own head and start being the driver.

It takes practice. It takes patience with yourself. And some days you’ll notice the voice, call it out, and it’ll laugh at you and get louder anyway. That happens. It’s not failure. It’s just Tuesday.

But you keep asking the question. You keep challenging what it tells you. And slowly — not in a dramatic movie-moment kind of way, but in a quiet, gradual, one-day-you-realize-it kind of way — it starts to have less of a hold on you.

That’s worth something. That’s worth a lot, actually.

Before I Go — A Question for You

I want you to think about your voice. Not the one you perform for the world — the one you actually live with.

What does it tell you about yourself when you’re alone? When you screw something up? When you’re trying to fall asleep and your brain won’t stop? When you’re about to do something that matters?

Is what it’s saying actually true?

And maybe more importantly — whose voice does it sound like?

You don’t have to answer that out loud. But sit with it for a minute. Because a lot of the mental health work that actually matters doesn’t start with a therapist’s office or a meditation app. It starts with that question, asked honestly, in the quiet.

You’re not crazy for having the voices.

You’re human.

—Evan