Two Voices, One Choice: Mine or Not Mine

How Do You Know If You’ve Ended the Day Successfully?

This one is dedicated to, well, you know who you are. Thank you.

I don’t think you really know if you’ve ended a day successfully until you wake up the next morning. That’s what I realized this week after being thrown into one of those spirals that feels like the movie shot where the camera zooms in on the character’s sweaty face while the room spins around them. That was me for two full days.

In moments like that, it feels like two versions of me are arguing. One voice drags me deeper into the spin, the other voice tries to pull me out. I didn’t have names for them until recently, but now I call them Karla and Not Karla.

The revelation that set it off was something I already suspected, but the confirmation hit hard. Not the kind of information you can shrug off.

So I cried, I got angry, and I stood in the middle of that tornado replaying everything in my head. I questioned my decision-making, my critical thinking, my ability to trust myself. And then I let silence settle in, and for me silence has always been a dangerous place. I isolate when I don’t know what to do. I pull back, I stay quiet, I try to carry everything on my own. But I’ve learned, slowly and painfully, that silence doesn’t solve anything. It gives other people’s narratives room to grow. It shuts out perspective. It amplifies fear.

And fear isn’t flat, it’s multifaceted. Like a polyhedral D&D die, except instead of numbers that gives you access to powers that move you forward, every side says the same thing: fear.

I don’t know about you, but I process things outwardly because I have to. Inwardly is already full. So I talk, I write, I record myself, I make sense of things by giving them form outside my own head. This time, the first thing I did was record a video, three minutes of me staring myself in the eye through the lens and asking: what do you do when this happens to you? It was rhetorical, of course. There’s no neat answer. You react from trauma, you react from experience, you react from instinct. And then I wrote a draft of this blog that I knew would taste weird if I hit publish, like a bolognese sauce taken off the stove too soon, bitter and undefined. So I set it aside and let it simmer.

Instead, I did something I don’t always do: I reached out. I talked to two people who know me well, and they gave me advice that was simple but cut through the fog. They told me to look at two extremes, Scenario A versus Scenario B, and ask myself which scared me more. And when I looked at it that way, the answer was obvious. The seas parted, the skies opened, the sun came through and with that clarity I was able to act.

Because here’s the thing: not asking the hard questions, not demanding answers is exactly what got me into this position in the first place. So I’m learning, and I’m growing, and that counts as progress.

After writing it all down and letting it simmer, I shut the laptop, turned off the lights, and went to bed. And when I woke up early this morning, I’d actually forgotten about everything for a minute. The sky was still dark, dawn just starting to hint at itself, so I rushed out to the balcony with my coffee to watch the sunrise. My two cats joined me for a little while, brave until the first loud noise spooked them back inside, and I sat there alone with the sea in front of me and the birds cutting their lines across the water, and for the first time all week I felt peace. Not the kind of peace you chase, but the kind you absorb when you realize, for a moment, that you’re simply okay.

And look, I’m also a realist. I know things spiral for me a little easier these days and not just because I’m living in a foreign country, without the people who usually keep me grounded, while trying to do all of this on my own. I don’t expect that I’ll never find myself in another tornado situation. But here’s the difference: this one lasted only a couple of days, and that’s a lot shorter than other times I’ve spent processing.

And my conversations with the people who love me were direct, which is why I love them back. They were clear, they were steady, and they felt safe enough to respond to me kind of forcefully. Not cruel, not mean, but in the way a good friend does when you’ve got a booger in your nose or lipstick on your teeth. They just said, “Girl,” and handed me a mirror. And that was exactly what I needed. One told me to decide which fear would win, the other told me to name them.

So my newest tool, my newest weapon against the self-destructive voices in my head, are the two labels: Karla and Not Karla – and I can tell you for a fact that this blog was written by Karla.

When I step back and look at the big picture, when I take stock of the last twelve months, especially the last nine, I can see progress. Real, tangible progress. And for me, that’s not just exciting, it’s necessary.

And you know, thinking about the people who are reading this and why you might still be coming back to this blog even though it’s not all rainbows, puppies, and sunshine, I have to ask: do you have these kinds of thoughts and voices in your head when you go through something crazy? Because if you do, I’m going to encourage you to use this tool. Give your thoughts those two labels. Compartmentalize them so you know which voice belongs to you and which one does not.

Because here’s the truth: labeling them this way is an act of confidence. It’s a reminder that at the end of the day, survival comes down to you. You’re the one who has to eat, who has to pay rent, who has to make sure you’re physically healthy, who has to build a social life, who has to find the job that pays the bills. Those “other voices” — the ones that whisper doubt, or replay someone else’s gaslighting, or shove you into silence — they’re not going to do that for you.

So this little tool has given me more confidence than I expected. And where it came from is actually a pretty funny story. But that’s a post for another day.

When it comes to asking for help, knowing the right person for the job is key.