Dialogue

I spend a lot of time alone. It's not weird. I study on average four hours a day and spend another four hours around those four hours trying to build up the conviction to keep studying.

I spend a lot of time alone.

So I talk to myself a lot. What is really interesting about talking to yourself is how private an activity it is. Unless you are comfortable brazenly talking to yourself in public, your outer auto-dialogue probably only takes place where no one else can see it.

Which is why I find myself wondering what other people sound like when they talk to themselves. Do they laugh when they make silly mistakes? Or do they exclaim when they've found the answer to a problem they were internally mulling over?

Regardless of what other people do, I actively antagonize myself. Almost constantly.

For some reason, which probably began manifesting itself in my childhood, I have two distinct inner voices. Or rather, two distinct personalities (the voice of my inner monologue always sounds the same. Interestingly, it doesn't really sound like the way I sound when I speak, but I think that's beyond the scope of this post).

The first personality talks rapidly. It speaks immediately but not always accurately, and rarely in full sentences. It is driven by emotions that I imagine most people have in abundance: love, compassion, happiness, etc. Gross feelings like that. It's overly romantic--it will start rhyming if I'm in a particularly delighted mood. It begins a thought but never really has time to finish it because...

The second personality is a grand antagonizer. Cynical, untrusting, full of hate, judgmental, and educated only in black humor, my second personality is probably the way I tend to portray myself. When I am alone, this is the only voice that I actually feel a need to express with outer vocalization, which is why the walls of my apartment have probably heard the phrase "I am going to murder myself" hundreds of times.

I have expressed before in this blog that I see the world in a very romantic light: everything is beautiful, magical, perfect. Nothing is impossible. Every little thing, every cosmic detail is imbued with a grandeur that one could spend an entire lifetime analyzing.

I truly believe this. Yet I am stopped by my own self when I attempt to explore such things. It is very interesting. I would much rather hate all things than accidentally express my real feelings on a topic and have those feelings end up being disgusting.

Which they would be. Because all emotion is unpalatable.