Interview with the Inner Critic
This Quiet Violence
Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. —James Joyce
Re-create yourselves: and let this be your best creation. —Friedrich Nietzsche
Above: Who's to say that memes don't have meaning?
When did you first hear it?
That voice that knows your name but never says it kindly?
The one that reprimands but never reassures?
Mine showed up in third grade, the day a classmate mimed my tic and the room erupted.
An unwelcome guest, it made its home in the pause between thought and speech, in the breath I hold while Tourette revs the engine and OCD checks every mirror twice.
So I tried something different—I scheduled an interview instead of another battle.
What follows is the lightly edited transcript of two voices learning to share one mic.
Me: Why are you here?
Inner Critic: To keep you from embarrassing us.
Me: That’s your elevator pitch?
Inner Critic: Don’t like what you are, love what you could be.
Me: A motivational poster that bites. Thanks.
Inner Critic: You asked. My job is simple: protect the brand.
Me: The brand?
Inner Critic: Yes, the brand. Someone has to keep the glass from shattering.
Me: I’m glass now?
Inner Critic: Glass wrapped in skin. I’m the bubble wrap.
Me: Bubble wrap can’t breathe.
Inner Critic: Better breathless than broken.
Me: And if I break?
Inner Critic: …I don’t know how to put you back together.
Me: When did you get so loud?
Inner Critic: When whispers stopped working. When you decided perfection was a prerequisite for love. When you made me responsible for keeping you safe in a world that was never designed to be safe.
Me: I never asked you to…
Inner Critic: You didn’t have to ask. I was born the first time someone laughed. I grew teeth the day you realized different meant dangerous. I learned to roar because silence got us hurt.
Me: But I’m not dying.
Inner Critic: Aren’t you? When’s the last time you wrote without consulting me first? Spoke without waiting for my clearance?
Me: What do you actually want?
Inner Critic: I want you to be loved.
Me: By controlling everything?
Inner Critic: By making you lovable. Big difference.
Me: Love isn’t earned through perfection.
Inner Critic: Then how?
Me: By showing up. Tics and all. Typos and all. Human and all.
Inner Critic: That sounds terrifying.
Me: It is. But terror shared is terror halved.
Me: New deal. You stay, but you work for me. Quality control, not quality prevention. Catch the typos, but leave the dreams. When the tics hijack the sentence, you wait; you don’t flood the silence with shame.
Inner Critic: And if people notice?
Me: Let them. I’m not a secret to be kept.
Inner Critic: What if they don’t understand?
Me: Then they don’t. But that’s their story to write, not ours.
Inner Critic: One more clause: if stakes are high—live talk, client call—I get emergency override.
Me: Fine. But override means nudge, not nuke. One reminder, not a rant.
Inner Critic: Deal…but while we’re at it—yesterday you wrote “perfectly adequete.”
Me: Adequate. Spelled, saved, crisis averted. Now shut it for twenty minutes.
Inner Critic: Ten seconds is purgatory. Twenty minutes is War and Peace.
Me: I sure hope you like Tolstoy.
Inner Critic: If you’re about to do something truly reckless…
Me: Like publish this conversation?
Inner Critic: Exactly.
Me: Too late.
Inner Critic: Then I guess we’re doing this together.
Me: We always were. It just took us this long to say it out loud.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
really love your writing, tom. appreciate the vulnerability, combined with your talent for self-expression through words.
This is excellent. I really enjoyed it.