A constant dispute is going on in my head made up of conflicting voices that fill up my days. One voice belongs to a strict stranger who constantly judges me, scolds me and gives rise to a persistent sense of self-dissatisfaction, because what I do is never enough. The other voice is of a kind friend who doesn't expect me to prove anything to them because they already recognise my worth - no matter what, I am good enough for them. The problem is that the stranger shouts incessantly while the friend whispers to me gently. Their low tone of voice is deafened by the stranger's noise.

The two live in a messy house with no windows or cameras. For a long time there was little room to understand what was going on inside.  Judging by the noise, it seemed that the stranger's powerful voice was right, and that the friend was nothing more than a feeble attempt of self-pity. And that's how I felt. I felt I needed to be yelled at all the time to get things done. I used to challenge that stern stranger by doing nothing all day and enhancing loops of demotivation. I pushed the stranger to the point where he would have to get angry at me. I used to wait for that scolding and all that hatred to act. With time and habit, those shouts didn't even seem so violent anymore but a normal monologue, as if that was the only way one could ever talk to me.

The problem was that I then forgot what it meant to feel proud of myself, to achieve my goals, to be satisfied. As soon as life gave me small satisfactions, I didn't know where to put them in the house. They brought the stranger to a state of total confusion. So, I looked for ways to leave the satisfactions in the garden without them ever entering the house. I did this by attributing them to external factors that had nothing to do with me: if I got a good grade it was only because the exam was easy, if I won in some sports competition it was only because there were few participants. Sometimes I prevented myself from reaching the goal at all so that I would not even have to face the satisfaction. I did this by raising the bar higher and higher when I realised that I had almost reached my goal. My life felt like a race where the finish line was initially at five kilometres from the start, as I got closer to it, the finish line moved to seven, then ten, then fifteen kilometres. When my fatigued body stopped running, the stranger arrived and told me off for giving up. I felt like a failure again, but this feeling was familiar to me and did not scare me anymore. The feeling was so strong that it erased everything that came before it. And when the friend gently tried to point out that I had reached many milestones: the five, seven, ten kilometres, he was laughed at, belittled and deafened by the stranger.

Still, as I said before, I had little clarity of what was happening inside the house. So, if someone at the time, had asked me if I considered myself to be self-critical, I would have said no. I was also critical of my own self-criticism and deemed it not to be strong enough to be classified as such. Opening the door of the house to other people helped me understand what was going on. I realised that the soft whispering voice of the friend was not at all weak, non-diligent and self-pitying as I thought. This voice was real, rational, and spoke clearly if I made space for silence in the house. Not only did the friend’s voice feel good, but it gently motivated me to do more, to give my best while being aware that my value as an individual did not change. Realising how stable my value is, made the stranger's reproaches even more useless. I no longer needed them to motivate me because I believed I could achieve what I wanted on my own. I still need an inner friend to protect me from the loops of self-criticism I sometimes fall into. I need them to make me realise that what I achieve truly belongs to me and was earned by me. I need them to help me forgive myself when I make mistakes, and to gently remind me to look back to see how far I’ve come.