One day when I was 24, something happened in my head. I’d been feeling down for a long time and didn’t think things could get much worse. I got that all wrong. I was eating my dinner when someone whose voice I didn’t recognise said “Hope that fucking chokes you”. I looked round, but the room was empty. I carried on eating and the same voice said “That tastes like shit”. I realised then that the voice was in my head. I was scared shitless, and stopped eating. Nothing more after a few minutes so I started, slowly, eating again. I finished my meal without incident and thought maybe it was just a momentary aberration. The rest of the day passed and there were no more interruptions and I kind of shrugged it off.
A couple of days later as I was trying to get to sleep, the voice said “You’re not going to wake up”. I sat up and looked round the semi-darkened bedroom but saw nothing. Then he said “You don’t really want to wake up anyway, do you?”. For the next hour or so he gave all the reasons for not living that had been floating round inside my head for months. After what seemed like hours, he stopped. I don’t remember ever feeling so terrified, and sleep came slowly and fitfully. I woke up feeling drained and unwilling to face the day ahead, but I reluctantly got up. The rest of the day I tried to carry on “normally” but I was always waiting for him to return. He didn’t.
Then, nearly a week later, I was just staring vacantly at the TV, the sound and images just floating over my consciousness, negative thoughts circling through my mind, when the same voice said “What the fuck are you still doing here?”. For the next few hours followed an endless stream of negativity and abuse. This guy really knew what buttons to press to make me question any reason for my continued existence in this world. I’m going to stop here, it’s hard to write about it. I found out later (as more voices appeared) that they REALLY hate me talking about them when they’re visiting, and when they’re not there it’s still not easy to talk about them in case I wake them up, so bear with me. More later.
As the days went on, the voice visited more and more often, and he got very creative with his abuse. He’d make me relive unpleasant moments from my life and vocalise some of the dark thoughts that I’d been having. It was like having my worst enemy living in my head, doing his best to make my life hell. He was succeeding, too. I tried listening to music, but it did little to put him off. Sleep was difficult, and when I did manage to drop off I didn’t get much rest. Over the next few days he was joined by more voices, each new one as objectionable as the first. Sometimes they’d combine forces and I faced an internal barrage of torment from an angry mob. Then came some help. A new voice appeared who seemed to be on my side. He argued with the others and told them to leave me alone. He was hugely outnumbered, but he did reduce the intensity of the personal assault on me as they focussed on him, giving me some respite.
Taking advantage of the lull, I decided to visit a friend, hoping it would take my mind off what was going on. Almost as soon as I got in the car, the voices stopped, and they were silent until I reached my friend’s house when the original one reappeared. I didn’t stay long; it’s hard to be sociable with an internal madman hurling abuse at you while you’re trying to have a conversation with someone else. Again there was silence while I was in the car, until I got back home. I discovered in the following days that I had peace while I was driving, so I began just cruising around aimlessly with no destination. I spent a lot of my meagre budget on petrol.
Sometimes, watching TV quietened the voices down a bit, until one day a new one arrived and started giving me a running commentary on what was happening on the screen. It was different from the usual abuse, but I found it very disconcerting. I turned off the TV, but he then began describing my every action in minute detail. I’d already decided previously that I wasn’t going to give them names - I didn’t want to encourage them by giving them the status a name would confer- but I couldn’t help naming this one “The Commentator”. He became a regular visitor, and although he wasn’t as unpleasant as most of the others, he was still unwelcome, and he ruined a lot of films and TV for me.
After keeping my voices under my hat for nearly 35 years, I’m finding writing about them quite therapeutic. The only person I ever told the full story to was Mandy, and she was sworn to secrecy. She not only accepted my “madness”, but positively embraced it, so she has my eternal gratitude.
After a while, I realised that the voices were here to stay, and the feeling of terror I had when they first visited began to ease. I still felt apprehensive when they came, but I was getting used to them. I began to think of them as uninvited guests, so from now on I’ll refer to them as the UGs. It’s quicker to type. The supportive ones were still outnumbered by the abusive ones, who now included individuals who shared their extreme political views attacking my own, and making offensive comments about people I was with. It became harder to socialise with friends as I never knew what the UGs were going to say about them. I was scared that I might vocalise some of the insulting remarks they made. In the early days, some of their speech occasionally leaked out of me, and it was a long time before I learned how to control it.
One of them has ultra-right-wing beliefs which horrify me. He considers me a racial mongrel because of my mixed English, Welsh and Scots blood. He feels compelled to share his ideas of race and eugenics with me and despises my own left-wing views, calling me a “fucking commie, pinko Trot”. He’ll sometimes rant on for ages without a break. Against my own policy, which I described previously, I named him Adolf. He’s one of my regulars. Sometimes, one of the good guys appears and takes him on in an ideological battle of wits. This is a welcome relief and I call my helper Leon. They can argue with each other for long periods and although I wish they’d both fuck off, it’s comforting to have someone on my side occasionally. A lot of them are very sweary, there’s one who constantly calls me a “cunting fucker” among other things, an insult I’ve adopted into my own vocabulary, frequently hurling it at politicians on TV. There’s plenty of suitable recipients at the moment, I find. Somehow, using the term myself has taken some of the sting out of it when it’s aimed at me personally.
Forming intimate relationships after the UGs arrived became almost impossible. I never knew how they’d react to a new person in my life. More than once, they took a vocal dislike to an object of my affection and I lost the previous easy-going approach to romance that I’d once had. When I’m depressed it’s even worse, as I just want to hold and be held, but the UGs make even that modest objective difficult. Most people tired of what they probably perceived as my indifference and it was a long time before I struck lucky and found someone who was willing to wait for me to stabilise. A couple of times, a relationship came to a premature end because of my inability to give myself fully emotionally. Still, quality is better than quantity, and I consider myself lucky to have found one person that I could connect with completely, and who the UGs not only didn’t hate, but completely ignored, all of the time we had together.
As the years have passed, I’ve discovered that sometimes I can engage the UGs in conversation and try to counter some of their negativity. It’s doesn’t always work, Adolf is especially impervious to my most well thought out arguments, but at least now I don’t just mutely accept what they dish out. I’ve also learned that if I avoid stress and don’t fuck about with my meds too much, the UGs are less bothersome. When they do visit, they’ve got to get pretty creative to surprise me now, although they do still manage at times. I’ve also found that drinking them away with considerably more units of alcohol than the BMA would advise to consume in a month, let alone a day, is no solution – they tend to return with renewed force the morning after, so no more half bottles of whisky at a time for me now. There are advantages to hosting the UGs though. It’s made me practically bulletproof to insults from others now. Also, in some cultures, I’d be revered as a deity. They’d build me a huge detached hut and I’d have 20 wives.
