Voices

Recently, very recently, I found myself in another tough match.  That seems to happen a lot these days.  Everyone I face is tough.  Nobody is giving anything away.

I’d been caught unexpectedly with an early butterfly sweep.  I’d been a little off-balance after trying to land a takedown and he hit the reversal without hesitation.  I managed to fight myself back from the bottom, and he slipped back into his butterfly guard.  Obviously, he had confidence in the position.  He’d already caught me with it once.

I was working my balance and defense as best I could, but I was teetering right at the edge of getting reversed again—and I couldn’t afford to lose any more points.  I tried to keep my base low, drop my hips, and pin his arms, but his guard was active and powerful.  I could feel myself right at the edge of losing position.

Then I heard a voice from the edge of the mat.

“Joel,” it said, “don’t go back down into that again.  Posture up!”

It wasn’t my regular coach.  It was a friend—another black belt and frequent training partner.  He was there watching my match and couldn’t keep himself from lending advice.

It was good advice.

Posture is one of the things I do best.  I have a relatively strong base, but I was allowing this opponent to move and control me.  So, I took the advice I was given.

I postured.

And things got better.  They didn’t get easy, but they got better.  My body knew how to move in posture.  My friend—my frequent training partner—knew that it was a familiar strong place for me.  He knew it was where I needed to be.  I heard what he had to say, and it changed everything about that match in that moment.

On my best days it feels like there are hundreds of voices competing for my undivided and fully dedicated attention.  On my worst days it feels like thousands.  They are a combined cacophony rocketing through my heart, mind, and soul, each demanding that I turn my eyes and tune my ears to whatever they have to say.  To be honest, what they have to say is seldom in my best interest.  The loudest voices are the ones with the least to offer.

External voices are the easiest to deal with, I think.  Solutions that exist in the physical world are solutions that I can, at least, understand.  It doesn’t require much bandwidth from me.  I can turn off a podcast I don’t want to hear.  As malignant as social media algorithms might be, I do have the authority to step away from them.  I could even choose not to listen to the voice of my supervisor—it might be a disastrous choice, but it’s a choice I have the power to make.

External voices are simple, in a way.  I can decide which voices to ignore and which to accommodate.  I can measure their value and isolate each one individually.  Sometimes, it’s difficult, yes, but I know it’s a skill I own.    There’s a certain level of discipline to it.  There’s a learning process.  I can teach myself to identify the voices worthy of my consideration and filter the rest away into obscurity.

The internal voices are different, though.

My mind as a constant battleground.  It doesn’t know how to stop.  It is continuously outflanked and assaulted by any number of thoughts, intrusions, and seemingly unsolicited memories—more than I could begin to number.  It’s a disharmonious chorus of opposing noise that constantly keeps me teetering barely on the edge of stability.

My brain doesn’t seem to be attracted to the voices that are good for me.  My mind is ceaselessly seeking its own destruction.  It tends toward the catastrophic—the most catastrophic—thinking it can find.  It’s a habit.  I don’t know why.  My brain will find the most disastrous outcome possible and then camp inside of it compulsively.  It will dwell there and rob myself of peace, hope, and, ultimately, even faith.  Then, when I try to counter my endemic pessimism with a form of forced optimism, I fall even further.

It’s a habit I’ve developed.  I developed it a long time ago.  I struggle against it every day.  I tell myself horrible stories about myself, and my stories are terribly written.

As a much younger man I spent a few weeks in southeast Asia.  I was visiting a primitive and remote Hmong village for a few days when a few of the local villagers offered to take me and my friends on a walk.  They wanted to show us something—at least that’s what I understood.  I don’t speak Hmong.  I had to trust what the translator said.

We were a couple miles into our walk when Thailand did a thing that Thailand does.  The sky cracked with thunder, and I noticed that all the villagers had abandoned us, leaving just me and my friends on the path.  I heard a deafening sound like jet engines across the field and realized that it was the wind pushing a sky full of black clouds and rain rapidly in our direction.  The rain arrived, pelting us with warm raindrops that felt like they were the size of my nose (it wasn’t nearly as broken and crooked in those days).  It was so warm and driving that it washed all the color out of my friend’s new baseball hat—the hat started out as red and was gray by the time the storm passed over.

My friends and I found ourselves trapped underneath this downpour and knew we had to go back to where we started—it was the only place we knew.  We reversed course and started walking, only to realize that the path we were traveling was clay—and now it was wet clay.  Wet clay is very hard to walk on.  We were slipping, sliding, and crawling on our hands and knees.  Making it even more difficult was the fact that, over years (possibly centuries) of use, the path had been traversed by thousands of wooden oxcarts.  Those carts had cut ruts as deep as my knees were tall into the center of the path.  Years of use had worn the outer edges of the path to slope toward the center—right into the ruts.

We fought valiantly, falling over ourselves as we muddled along the wet clay, falling in and out of those deep ruts.  I imagine we would have eventually made it back, but it would have taken a very long and painful time.  The idea of fighting those miles through the mud became daunting.  I was asking myself if I had the mental fortitude to keep moving—or if I really had any other choice—when a farmer in an ox-drawn cart came creeping around the bend.  He didn’t seem to be moving in any sort of hurry, despite the torrential downpour, and the wheels of that cart fit perfectly inside of the ruts.

He noticed our plight. I imagine it was hard not to.  His eyes quickly found me, and he gestured in the direction of the village we had come from, then to the empty cart.  I didn’t speak the language, but I knew what he was asking.  I looked at my friends and none of us disagreed with the best course of action.  We loaded into the empty cart for the slow ride back to the village where we had started our journey.

It was still raining and I was soaked, but I had given up on comfort.  That cart fit perfectly on the path and that ox had obviously made this journey several times.  We traversed the slippery clay path with the assistance of a farmer and an ox, eventually returning to the dry primitive hut where I had started my morning.

I still wonder where we were going before that storm hit.  The villagers had been excited to show us, so it must have been good.  But I never got there.  I gave up on the prospect of something new and exciting when the discomfort arrived.  I gave up on it and traveled the worn path back to where I started—back to something that wasn’t necessarily comfortable but was, at least, familiarly uncomfortable.

My mind has a thing for ruts.  It likes to listen to the voices it knows, even when it knows the voices are malevolent and malicious.  There is a strange but hideous comfort to finding familiar voices, despite my knowing those voices intend me harm.  My mind treats them as if they were an obligation.

I spend a lot of time in my head trying to fix the things that are in my head.  After all, I have official training and education—I have an undergrad in psychology and a Master of Social Work degree.  I learned how to do therapy.  Doesn’t that mean I should be able to therapize myself?I wade into the battleground that is my mind and add my own voice to the discord, foolishly arguing with myself in an attempt to silence the competing voices in my head.  But my voice isn’t loud enough—not loud enough to interrupt the condemnation and accusations screaming from every direction.  So, even my own voice simply adds to the disharmonious symphony.  It simply becomes more noise among the other noise.  Every voice demands I follow where they go, but I can’t follow that many places at once.

The voices of a past long gone and the voices of a future that hasn’t existed concoct ghosts in the confines of my mind.  They are ghosts that can do real damage to my mind, too.  They are not harmless.  My ghosts are not kind to my mind.

The voices inside of me know my weaknesses and they know my wounds.  They see me every day.  They know everything about me.  They know that I struggle with feelings of unworthiness.  They know I struggle to believe God has my best in His mind at all the times.  They know how much I struggle with faith and against my shame and my guilt.  The noise in my mind resembles a cheap defense attorney trying to make a name for himself by leveraging every poor thought of my own making against the pressure points where they will cause the most harm.

For all of my education, for all of my credentials, and for all the arrogance of believing that those things matter, I begin to begin to believe what those voices have to offer.  I hear them and I listen.  I listen to them because they are loud and relentless.  I listen because they are right.  They are right because I have heard them so many times.

They scream that I am not worthy of love—and I hear them.

They scream that nobody wants to be near me—they only tolerate me because they feel sorry for me.

They shout that my God is a tyrant and I have failed Him too many times.  He is finished with me.  Everything I’ve done in my past is too much for Him and now He seeks to punish me.  The best I can get is a participation trophy—God won’t let me win.  I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life and it’s nothing less than I deserve because God has abandoned me.

They are lies and I know they are lies.  I yell my defiance into the void, but my voice has no leverage—it has no power.  They are lies of great weight and of great pain.  They take a toll, driving my own weak voice into obscurity until I can’t even hear myself. 

I have nothing to offer.

I might have made a mistake, or he might have done something right.  I wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.  Either way, I was fighting for my life.

Somewhere in the mad scramble of our combat, he had managed to touch me with a couple punches—just enough to compromise my posture.  Seeing the opportunity, he jumped on a flying guillotine submission, pulling me into his guard with hands locked around my head and neck.  I could feel his grip tightening as he pulled me to the mat—he was remarkably strong.  It wasn’t just his strength that I was worried about.  He was also a very technical fighter, and he had found the perfect angle.  I could feel constriction as the submission quested for my carotid arteries.

It was a tight choke.

I knew I could tap.  I could just let this fight be over.  I’d lost fights before.  It would be a shame, and I would be a disgrace to my team.  They’d done so much to get me ready for this fight.  They would be disappointed in me, and I would no longer be worthy of their love.  But this was a tight choke, and I might have to tap.

My own thoughts, coursing through my mind in this moment, were tumultuous, but so too were the voices I heard just a few feet away.  Our exchange had occurred right in front of his corner—right in front of his coaches and teammates.  They could see how close this choke was, and they could see that I was almost finished. 

They added their words to the fight, screaming in my direction.

“We’ve got you now!”

“You’re done!”

This fight is over.  You lose!”Even with his arms wrapped around my head, I could hear their shouts.  I was finished and I was done.  I had already lost.  All that was left was for me to acknowledge defeat…

There are voices that live outside of me, maintained by individuals who live outside of my mind.   I collect the things they have done, they are doing, and the things they say and pull them forward into the internal battle raging inside of my mind.  I possess them so I can own them and fight against them as if they were some horrendous pet that must be fed from my hand.  I adopt those thoughts as if they were my own.  The external voices are loud, but when I transform them into internal voices, they loom even louder.

They scream in my mind.

…His corner was loud, so very loud.  They were crass and ruthless.  They shouted expletives and insults.  They told me I was losing.  They yelled that I was done.  They screamed for me to just tap.  They told me I wasn’t good enough to be fighting at this level.

They were right.  I knew they were right.

But then, from the other side—from my corner—I heard a voice.  It was a distant voice, but it was a voice I knew.  I had a corner, too.  They were with me, and they knew me.

“Joel,” I heard my name, not loudly, but succinctly.  “You’re fine.”

He was right.  I was fine.  This was uncomfortable, but I was fine.

“Build your base.  Let’s apply some shoulder pressure.  You know how to do this.”

He was right.  I did know how to do this.  I had drilled it, trained it, sparred it thousands of times. 

“Now start fighting the hands.  Get rid of that grip.  You’re going to be fine.  We’ve got this.”

He was right.  I did have this.  I was going to be fine.

I had been listening to the wrong voices.

There is a war that wages inside of myself, inside of my own mind.  It is a war that I fight against myself—against every intrusive thought, every invasive notion, and against every pervasive memory that enters my thinking.  So often the damage is not damage that is done.  It is damage that I assume or anticipate.  I take hold of some external action elicited by some external being and live as if it belongs to me.  I assume the worst and I own the worst, mulling the worst over in my mind like a project.

I find myself wandering among the voices pinballing through my mind, into the dark and cavernous spaces that they create.  Some would call it getting lost in my own thoughts, and they might be right.  But those aren’t just thoughts I am losing myself among.  They are malevolent fantoms with malice in their hearts.  My thoughts—the words in my mind—are seeking an avenue to my destruction.  My destruction is a thing I have grown to embrace for some reason. 

I often listen to the wrong voices.

But it’s possible that I know the sound of the right voice.  There are thousands of voices competing for my attention, but there are few that deserve it.

It had been 13 years since the last time I had competed, but I was just minutes away from stepping on the mats again.  I hadn’t done this in a long time, but I was savoring the environment.  There was something about being surrounded by my team—kids, adults, parents, competitors, supporters—that made me ask why I had taken 13 years off.

I was checking the brackets for how soon my first match would happen when one of the team mothers (standing beside me) asked, “who are you going to want to coach you?”

It was a really good question.  It had been long since the last time I fought.  There were so many options now.  One of my training partners had been with me through the entire camp, getting me ready for this moment—he knew how I fought and moved.  I had a couple of other competitors nearby who had hammered out hundreds of rounds with me.  They would be good coaches.

But then the answer came to me, almost easily.

“Robert,” I said, “Robert should coach me.  My ear knows how to find his voice.”

Over decades of fighting my ear had become tuned to Robert’s voice.  I could find it in even the most chaotic moments.  I could hear it even when I was at my worst.  I knew how to find his voice.

My sheep hear My voice, I know them, and they follow Me. (John 10:27) 

My mind doesn’t know how to find the right voices, not on its own.  I’m bad at that.  If I was good at it, I wouldn’t struggle like I do.  I’m working on it, but I have a long way to go.

I have no true power over the voices that are in my mind.  I can’t control them and I can’t silence them.  I’m not that strong, as much as I wish I were.  I can’t make myself strong, as much as I wish I could.

Then I remember something a friend asked me, not too long ago.  It changed the way I was thinking about the way I was thinking. 

“Have you considered that this might be spiritual?”

That’s kind of a hard one for me.  It’s easy for me to believe that my entire experience is anchored here in the physical world where I exist—that my thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions.  But my world is so much more than that, even if my mind finds it difficult to grip.  I can’t deny that there is a spiritual dimension to my universe—I’ve experienced too much to be convinced otherwise.

For though we live in the body, we do not wage war in an unspiritual way, since the weapons of our warfare are not worldly, but are powerful through God for the demolition of strongholds. We demolish arguments and every high-minded thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, taking every thought captive to obey Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:3-5) 

It’s easy for me to underestimate the spiritual nature of the world, and that might be why I struggle so much.  It might be why I work so hard to maintain my status as a conquered soul.

It’s possible that I cannot silence the voices.  They’re too loud and I’m too flawed.  Those grooves are worn into the pathways of my mind—the ones that keep bringing me back and forth to and from the comfortable places I don’t want to be.  Undoing them is never easy, and it might not be possible.

Maybe that’s not what I need to do.  Maybe I don’t need to silence the voices—because I can’t.  Maybe I need to learn to find the right voice.  Even when the loudness is raining and reigning all around me, my ear learns to find the voices that matter.

Strangely, those voices are usually the quietest.  They’re whispers that I don’t need to strain to find.  They are the whispers that speak directly to the places where my soul recognizes them.

Then He said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the LORD's presence." At that moment, the LORD passed by. A great and mighty wind was tearing at the mountains and was shattering cliffs before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake there was a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire there was a voice, a soft whisper. (1 Kings 19:11-12) 

I know who I belong to, and I know His voice.  Even amid the chaos, even surrounded by noise that is almost physically painful, my ear knows the voice of my master.  He promised to give me the desires of my heart.  He seeks to align my thoughts with His, so I can begin to understand what my desires truly are.  If my ear finds those desires then my heart will surely follow.  Maybe—just maybe—it will even create of route in my thinking that is so well travelled that it defeats the ruts that cause me to slip and fall.