Seldom do some people listen to the little voice in their head; I was given no choice.
The morning which would set forth the event that would irrevocably change everything was just like any other, with the clouds hanging low, washing away the build-up of dust that had settled over the streets during the night. The wind caught between the valley would make its way through the dense trees and eventually ended up howling a gust against my window. The rattling of the rickety hinge blew one of the windows open. The gust invited itself through and pursued through the stacks of paper on my desk. The whirlwind knocked over some of my collectible astronaut miniatures that were teetering on the edge of their amateurly installed display shelves. This unwelcome gust rudely awakened me from my deep sleep the second I heard my favorite miniature break into pieces on the floor.
I spent a good few minutes trying to find the head of the miniature, as it seemed it fell out of the helmet. After my long search, sliding my hands over the surface of my dusty tiles, I gave up for now and just put the figurine back on the shelves. The sight of the headless astronaut put me in a bad mood right from the get-go. But I didn’t have any time to waste scouring every inch of my room; I had to get to my studies. Rarely do I ever crack open my book to study this early, but seeing as my midterms were nearing, I somehow fought against my procrastinating nature and forced myself to write my study guide. I made it my mission to at least get through a page of notes before taking a little break to scroll through my phone. I knew myself well, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to focus for long before I caught myself daydreaming and losing my place in my notes. My active imagination was the biggest hurdle that I struggled to master.
As I rapidly finished the daunting task of writing a whole page of notes, I figured it was only fair to reward myself with a little five minutes of scrolling through the internet. In that small frame of time, when I mindlessly scrolled through funny videos, I came across one video in which the person was comically pointing out how the voice in our heads never changes volume.
They specified that even if you shouted a sentence in your head or mentally whispered words, the volume never changed. I always quickly go to the comments to see the witty replies that people would leave. The comment section was split among two types of people. One side would point out how they didn’t have an inner monologue. No inner voice that narrated every thought as words in their head. The other side of the comments was replying to how their mind was blown at how right the video was—detailing how they attempted to change the volume of their inner monologue by screaming mentally or whispering and being taken aback at how the volume would stay consistently the same. I thought it was so dumb because it’s evident that the volume doesn’t change. It’s not a voice. It’s just your thoughts. But then I started really thinking about it. This quandary snapped me out of my daze, and I leaned back on my chair to think.
I looked up at my ceiling and thought things. I spoke to myself in my mind, just listening to my inner monologue. I tried to whisper thoughts, but the voice was low, and when I yelled, it was the same. I couldn’t explain how it worked since I had never really thought this deeply about it. How the inner monologue even works. And why do some people not have one? How do they function without an inner voice directing their life? How do they read a book without a voice in their head to guide the story and visualize the events? Do they feel the words? Do they feel the events as emotions? I think I wasted more than two or three hours just laying there thinking as I spun my chair back and forth.
At this point, I had completely forgotten to get back to studying. My curiosity over this strange thought permeated through my mind. As I sat laid back in my gaming chair, I could feel my hair stand up; like the build-up of static electricity in the air. as a hum crept its way through my ears, I quickly dug my pinky and swiveled around in my ear till it was gone. I didn’t overthink it. I blew it off as having something to do with the power lines I lived close to. Then as I lost myself in my thought, I tried to yell again in my head, continuing my half-baked experiment in my own mind. But this time something was different. The voice was a little louder. I couldn’t explain why it felt like so. I sprang upright and looked side to side, wondering what had changed. I thought I was going crazy for a second. Or that I was probably focusing too hard on my inner monologue, and my brain was tricking itself somehow.
At first, I could barely sense anything was different. I stopped my little psych experiment before I freaked myself out too much and decided to distract myself from the idea by getting rid of some chores. The concept of studying was a foreign one to me now as I tried to distance myself from thinking about anything for now. My mind took a backseat as I did half-brained chores around the house like cleaning up after the cat’s litterbox or sweeping random places.
“Honey, what are you doing sweeping the dining room at this time?” my mom creepily whispered behind me as she walked around the corner, dragging her feet in her bunny flip-flops.
She didn’t really creep up on me; it just felt that way to me because I was lost in thought. as much as I tried to stop thinking about the video, something about the occurrence before really spooked me.
“nothing momma, I’m just keeping busy,” I said.
“well, why don’t ya take your butt upstairs and get to studying? I bet you haven’t even cracked open your notebook since you woke up.” She snarked back.
I knew she was right. There were more important things to do, and I was wasting time because I freaked myself out thinking too hard over some nonsense. I made my way back upstairs and sat down to organize my scattered papers. The window had blown open again had the wind was starting to get on my nerves. So to remedy this janky window, I tied a shoelace around the middle knobs. It wasn’t until I sat down to study that I started to get irritated. Growing ever frustrated with these god-forsaken pages of equations I couldn’t even begin to solve, my inner voice shouted. This inner yell threw me forward in a jerk reaction, causing me to wince at the loudness of it.
“What the hell was that?” I said out loud to myself. I looked around my room trying to spot where that yell had come from. I peeked outside the hallway thinking it was my mom who had called for my attention. But after realizing that it was not her, I came to realize that it had come from my own mind. I tried to brush it off and left the equations unsolved as I scrolled through my Twitter feed in an attempt to distract myself again. But every tweet I read in silence was read in a shout by my inner voice. Every word was hard to read, as the voice in my head grew louder and louder to the point where I couldn’t even think to myself, but at the same time, I couldn’t help it.
My inner monologue was questioning everything. Everything I thought was done in words. and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking. Regardless of my efforts to stop thinking about anything, my inner voice would do as it pleased. It wasn’t as easy as closing my mouth. There was no bind or stitches that could shut up the mouth of my mind.
After drinking a few pills for my newly developing headaches I lay in the fetal position on my bed facing the blank wall, to not run the risk of my mind running amok and voicing its thoughts about every passing detail of my room and the world beyond the window in a daydream. I avoided thinking anything by listening to music. the words of each song helped me avoid thinking anything at first. But as the familiarity of each song played throughout my playlist my brain could not help but sing along to each song. The voice within my mind oftentimes singing to the lyrics was louder than the song itself. After enough time had passed, the songs were no longer registering in my ears. All I could hear was myself singing the lyrics of the music, without even knowing what the song playing was.
I couldn’t escape this never-ending torture; the voice was inescapable. I laid in bed trying to think of what to do, but in doing so came to drive myself insane at having to listen to my own voice throw out ideas at max volume. It became so loud that I couldn’t hear my own mother who had come upstairs to my room in a fury.
“Hello! are you deaf? I have been calling you for 20 minutes! The food is gonna get cold; get your lazy butt up and get to the dinner table now!” she hollered.
I didn’t respond, I just turned over to get up, and after she saw me in my horrid state with dark bags under my eyes and a tired expression, she lowered her anger and softly hushed me out of my room to eat. Dinner had done me no good as I still couldn’t escape the stream of thoughts blasting away in the depths of my subconscious. When my mother tried to start a conversation to fill the silence in the room, I tried my best to talk to her, but I couldn’t remember what I had been doing. And even though I tried to avoid remembering what I did, I could stop my mind from doing so. But as I spoke up to just say anything that came to mind, I found a great calm; as I spoke out loud, my mind was quiet. Because everything I would think of, I just spoke out loud instead. Not giving my mind a chance to think, just say.
That moment was a blur. I couldn’t remember a single word I had said the whole night. For me, that was a success. But I took notice of my mother’s off-put face as I made my way out of the kitchen, talking to myself all the way up to my room. I didn’t realize how crazy I probably sounded to them. I huddled up in bed with my headphones at max volume. I listened in to live radio of orchestra music. anything white-out words for my brain to focus on and amplify. I stared out the open window at the clear night sky. My gaze was centered on this particularly out-of-place cloud that rained over a house in the distance. I found the unlikeliness of such a thing happening so funny that I hadn’t noticed my mother had been standing over me, listening to I speak all of my passing thoughts. She pulled my headphones from my head, demanding my attention.
“what’s with all that yammering? You sound like a lunatic, yapping away at yourself” she said.
“oh uh—no I was just talking to a friend. Over the phone… see” I turn over my phone to show her it’s on, but it just shows the blank home screen. “oh, umm… looks like she hung up. damn, let me call her back.” I mumbled.
I knew she didn’t buy it. I could tell from her stern pose and raised eyebrow that she knew I was bullshitting. But regardless she didn’t press me about it.
“Alright, well keep it down,” she said as she made her way out shaking her head. I didn’t know the concerning effects of this mannerism would have on my life until it got worse. I began to speak all of my thoughts out loud; every single idle thought. At first, my little life hack to avoid the loud thoughts was no big deal. Aside from the strange looks of passersby when I talk to myself out loud at the store or when I would walk to school. Although, in class, I had no choice but to listen in to my ever-increasing inner narrator. No doubt the teacher would send me home if I spoke my every thought out loud in class, given no choice but to sit in silence without the ability to focus on even so much as a simple lesson. Just watch as the teacher write indecipherable gibberish on the whiteboard, as my brain is too busy screaming into itself to read the symbols on the board.
Life at home did not get any easier. It appeared that my newfound habit had gotten on my parent’s last nerve. My mother looked constantly irritable. Every so often when we would pass each other on the hallway, she would give me this side-eye look of disapproval. They would constantly try to shut me up. She was yelling at me from across the echoing hallways to stop talking. The annoyance got to a point where my mother busted through my door one night; her face lit up red as her temper had risen to explosive levels. she yelled at the top of her lungs for me to shut up. Her neck was swelling, and her veins were showing when she screamed for me to close my mouth. But I couldn’t. as much as I didn’t want to tell them what was going on because I knew they would send me to the loony bin, my toxic habit of speaking my every passing thought blurt out to her that my inner voice was deafening me; that I had to speak my every thought to avoid thinking them.
Inadvertently, my fear had come to reality, as the very next day she had me sent to a therapist. But the therapist didn’t yield the results they were looking for. The therapist told my parents I had developed some never-before-seen type of severe psychological disorder. I wanted to just keep my thoughts to myself, but all this would do was make my mind feel like a balloon; the pressure made my skull hurt so much that I had to breathe all those loud thoughts out to get the pain to stop. Sadly the consequences of this were unavoidable. Within a week my mother had me admitted to a mental hospital, saying that my constant talking was driving her crazy; describing to the doctor how my constant talking echoing through the house felt like she had a voice in her head that she couldn’t silence. Little did she know the accuracy of that statement was in my case; I scoffed at the irony.
Past the hammering sound of my inner voice banging away at the side of my head, I heard from the doctor that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this. A few others in the past week had also been experiencing a similar illness; one he called the Shout syndrome. He is unsure of what’s causing it. I was hoping for reassuring words, but instead, I felt the hole I was about to be tossed in get dug deeper.
I didn’t want to go. I tried to fight my way out of their hold but to no avail. And as the padded doors closed behind me, I contemplated one last escape, but it was too late. I had voiced out all of my escape plans during my escort. On our way to my room, we heard a subtle whistling sound right before a pop. as the doctors talked to my parents, every so often we would hear the same whistle and pop, but the doctor seldom flinched at the sound. We passed what seemed like a common area—a big auditorium filled with tables, chairs, and unreadable posters on the walls. There were high windows that let in natural light, but there was no scenery to look at as they were angled partially up at the sky.
The air was frigid as a smooth breeze glided over my skin carrying the smell of rot into my nose. The scent that registered in my brain was the opposite of what I expected a place so clean to smell like. Everything was white, from the tiles on the floor to the walls and ceilings. There were a few people there sitting around who looked like astronauts. They wore clear, bubble-like helmets. But within the helmet, I could see their wide open mouths. They jittered around their heads, eyes wide open as if screaming for something. But no sound could be heard from them. It crept a static sensation up my spine when I made eye contact with one of them. The horror in their eyes would stay engrained in my mind for the entire day.
Time in this white padded room was at a standstill. Yet, even though the room lacked any memorable sights, my inner voice would still attempt to continue its narration of the nothing that filled the room.
Then it got louder.
Talking over my inner voice was now no longer enough. The doctors noticed that it must have gotten louder as my habitual constant speaking had raised to a yell. Occasionally I was brought into a bright room strapped to my bed. They would have me read from a screen out loud. The sentences were comprised of random words that often made no sense to me, but after reading through them, they would quickly adjust a knob in their headsets and jot down on a notepad. A tall man would then walk over to me and paste little patches connected to wires on my head. I stared intensely into his green eyes as his face was lit by the small screen from which all the wires connected to.
Then they would have me read again. the voice within was shaking my brain; each syllable was a thunder that crashed against the inside of my skull. After they all finished taking down their notes, one of them took out a syringe and flicked the very tip of it before injecting my neck. The sound of my inner yell hurt almost more than the stab itself. But after a minute passed, I heard the voice quiet down for a minute. It was almost a blissful experience, albeit a short-lived one.
Minutes afterward, it grew louder than it was before. My eyes felt a pressure behind them as if the voice itself was pushing them out. My head grew heavy as if the very words I thought filled my brain with its weight. I was numb, unable to speak, only suffering as the voice jabbed pains at my temples. Then one of them comes through the door and slides my head into a bubble helmet. It was near airtight as they clamped it to my thick neck padding. The sight of my breath against the glass launched me into a claustrophobic panic. The suffocating air being pushed through a small tube that was attached to a mechanism behind the helmet had me hyperventilating. The men said nothing. They all stood and waited for me to tire out and calm down before they wheeled me out to my room where I spent the day screaming over the swelling inner voice.
The room was padded to offer enough comfort to sleep. But I seldom ever managed to do so. My booming thoughts building up a pressure against my eyes kept me constantly awake. Time in here passed at unknown intervals. I became accustomed to what time it more or less was when my handler would come in to take me out. They strolled me out into the common area and sat me down next to others next to the others and their strange helmets.
I turned my head and looked at the girl sitting next to me. I shuddered at the unsightly swelling of her face. Her head was like a ripe tomato; thick veins from her forehead were pumping, and the weight of it made her neck too weak to support it, causing her to rest the mushy side of her head on the inside of the bulbous helmet. Snot dripped out of her nose, and her ears leaked a yellow fluid that stuck to her hair. The more I looked around, the more I saw others like this. Some of them had no eyes. The swelling probably pushed them out of their sockets. I knew this was the case as one kid leaned forward too much and his eyes spilled out of him, sticking to the glass of his helmet.
I cried as I sat there, contemplating my fate. Wondering if I was gonna end up like them, walking around, losing my balance like them, as if teetering on a tightrope. You could hear a pin drop in the room if the inner monologue didn’t consume the attention from all the sounds you could possibly receive. I laid my head on the table and looked out into the sky past the window. it was a beautiful clear blue that instilled a sense of freedom waiting to be grasped, only to be interrupted by tiny droplets of rain that started to race down the glass, converging with one another and puddling up at the rusty brace that held the glass. I didn’t question the oddity of the mysterious rain falling from the clear sky because my eyes were pulsing from the pressure of my inner conscience shouting away at the frontal part of my head. Then suddenly goosebumps shuddered up my body, and the air tasted like static. My eyes felt a pushing sensation as I was forced to do nothing but to hear myself think.
Then… the voice got louder.
And louder…
…then something happened that left me in a state of tormenting hopelessness. in front of me the very next day at the same girl as the day before. Her head was now so swollen that it was compressed into her helmet. I saw her sit there looking at me as several people tried to take the helmet off her, as her thin boney body couldn’t hold up her head anymore. Her eyes looked directly into mine as they popped out of their sockets and pressed against the glass, getting smushed by her stretching head. Then the glass from her helmet cracked, and the silence in the room was now filled with the sound of an ear-piercing scream that whistled out through the crack like a boiling kettle. And as another crack appeared, the people handling her strapped her into a padded hand truck and pushed her quickly to the door on the side of the room.
“hurry ready the new mixture.” shouted the green-eyed man that ran beside the two men pushing the cart.
As they blasted through the door, I stood up to see what was happing to her. I couldn’t see past the high glass window of the door, but I could hear the room become filled with a horrific silence after the sound of a loud pop pushed against the door and splattering the window in red. I looked at my feet and saw blood creep its way under the slit of the door. The time after that moment was a blur. I couldn’t focus or think about anything else. I just know I was back in my assigned room when I snapped out of the trance I had been under.
To my surprise, my parents came in to visit the same day. I looked at them from a distance as they were distraught at my appearance. My mother cried over my father’s shoulder as the doctor spoke to them, something I couldn’t understand. I saw her signing papers as she wept onto the clipboard occasionally glancing back at me; she could barely hold eye contact for longer than a second as doing so made her lips quiver and her hands shake. After the doctor had finished flipping through many papers on his metal clipboard, she stood up to kiss the glass on my helmet and hug me before she was escorted out. After I saw her face for the last time, the doctors strolled me back into the room with the bright lights and injected me with something. It made my body feel numb, but nothing could rid me of the pain of the screaming narrator that described every sensation. and yet, I felt a release of pressure from behind my eyes.
I can’t remember how long I was here anymore. The days in the white padded rooms would pass without signs of time moving forward. Every day the tension would get doubled. Every day I would end up in the room with the bright lights, again being injected with a syringe labeled in a different color. Then I was moved to the common area again where I saw less and less of the bobbleheads. as they escorted me back to my room I took a glance at the room with the big lights as one of the doctors barged out covered in red holding a syringe with a different color label as yesterday, yelling something I couldn’t hear past my own screaming thoughts. The room was painted with blood, the walls splattered with pink matter and shards of what I could only think were parts of a skull. I knew that was to be my fate as my body could no longer support my head.
The very next day as they strolled me to the commons area. A lonely frigid air filled the space where people once stood; there was only one other kid in there. His body was frail, and the fabric of his clothes was loose. as if his body was nothing but bones supporting his pressurized head inside that helmet. Yellow liquid slowed out of his nose and ears and dripped into his gaping mouth permanently locked into the face of a scream. He looked at me once before he hung his head down.
The lights above flickered subtly, and cloudy dark skies illuminated the room in a somber glow. Men in white attire came running in with a stroller as. I noticed the glass from his helmet had cracked. Through the cracks seeped drips of blood. I could hear his whistling scream depressurize his helmet as the men tied him to the hand truck to move him out quickly as they injected him with something on his arm. But it was too late. His bubble burst, spewing out chunks of brain matter and tissue all over the floor and onto me. His body jerked as they tied him to the hand truck, swinging his empty helmet case onto the head support.
They drew blood samples out of his dried-up body and other men jotted down solutions on their metal clipboards. I stared motionless at his frail body strapped into the cart, helmet headless and dripping in chunks of tendons and fat. for almost a second, my impending sense of doom and the trauma of seeing it all happen in near slow motion made the voice in my head fell silent. It was just me left.
Then they came for me…
They wheeled me into the room with the big lights again. The pressure in my brain was too much to handle. The voice was screaming in agony as they strapped me into the bed. Every word was like the bang of a gun. My nose dripped in a yellow goo that smudged the bottom half of my helmet and stuck to the thinning strands of hair caught in the folds of my pressurized face against the surface of the helmet. I knew what was coming. I almost didn’t want to accept that this was the end. The doctors scurried to prep a new syringe with a new label. I knew it was the end. The voice was no longer narrating my thoughts; it was only painful screams that didn’t even sound like my voice. It felt like someone else was shouting in my ear at the top of their lungs and vibrating my very skull. I felt my eyes mush against the glass being pushed out by the voice screaming in my mind as they tried to inject my jittering body. When I thought it had reached its limit, it only grew louder.
And louder!
And louder!
AND LOUDER!
The doctors had placed me upside down against the bed, and I felt the opening of the back part of my helmet. I felt jabs at my skin and slicing off my skull, but there was no pain from it. The glass in front of my eye finally cracked and just when I heard the whistling of my pressurized scream ring through the room, I knew what came next. Memories flashed through my mind not as words but as visuals of all the things I had done up until now. Flashes of my parent’s faces were the last thing to fly by until finally…
Silence.
A peaceful quiet I had once forgotten. There was no pop, only darkness. I stood on a dark platform. There was no light source anywhere, yet I could still see my own body. There was definitely a silence, but also, the booming voice was now a whisper. I felt a strange disconnect on the right side of my body. As if it was getting stretched out farther and farther away. The voice was growing distant, fading into the darkness. And then, the darkness was halved. The void I was inhibiting was now twice as small. Then I saw a thin line of light that opened up into a blinding glare.
I was facing up moving my eyes side to side, trying to orient myself as my body was lying down when I remembered I was just standing up. The immediate thing I noticed was that there was no longer a voice screaming at my every thought. There was actually no voice at all. I can’t even remember what it felt like to have an inner voice, and I struggled to even visualize it because the concept of it was almost like it was never known to me. I saw the doctor standing over me shining a light in my eyes and checking his equipment.
“what’s going on… how am I alive?” I struggle to mutter out. I was shaken at being able to listen to my own voice after so long. I had almost forgotten what it sounded like. Machines beeped and whirred as the doctor continued to analyze me.
“a miracle,” said the doctor as he walked up to my right side and checked my eyes with a flashlight.
“I don’t understand… what happened to me? I thought I was d-dead for sure.” I whispered
“the mixture worked. We were able to pause the shout syndrome for the longest amount of time possible for surgery. Your surgery had to be flawless on the first try. out of all the 33 people you are the only one to make it to the end of the surgery.”
My eyes dried from my shock at hearing his words. Thinking about everyone that had been here. The sheer odds that I was even alive was a revelation I couldn’t swallow.
“but… how? where did the voice go? I struggled to get my words out as my throat felt like it was filled with glass shards.
He took off his glasses, folding them neatly into his breast pocket and taking a deep breath.
“It was… controversial. But it was the only way we found would work. The brain is made in two halves. After all our observations, we noticed a strange detail. During a brain scan, we observed where the voice of my consciousness was focused and where the source of the shout came from. The serum we developed effectively shuts down one half of your brain temporarily, causing the inner conscious voice to migrate to the other half. In this way, we somewhat corralled the shouting to one-half. That’s when the clock started ticking”
“so you…y-you split my brain?”
“Precisely. But… there were some drawbacks.
Drawbacks?
“yes. after the surgery we were able to corral the inner conscience voice to a specific section a your left hemisphere and then we had no choice but to sever the connection.
“why not just remove the section of the brain altogether? What if the shout comes back?”
He sat down on the plastic chair next to my bed and exhaled nervously. “we initially thought of that as a solution. But we realized that to do so would cause the brain to immediately migrate the inner conscious voice to a different area as it sensed the section being removed. This all happens in fractions of seconds. So I decided the best course of action was to keep the section there but sever the connections. “
“so the voice is still in there, just locked away?”
He leaned in. “yeah, imagine like a cage. It is still connected to the blood vessels so it…err, uh… you will remain alive, but it won’t affect other functions of your brain… I think. I’m going to be completely honest with you; we still don’t understand what the shout syndrome really is, or what even causes it in the first place.”
“I guess I’ll be the only one who’ll ever remember how it felt.”
“I pray you will be the last one,” he said hanging his head down in nervous defeat, whispering at the floor. The exhaustion in his eyes carried a sense of dread in them.
“thank you. Thank you for saving me.” I whispered
He looked up at me and the skin around his eyes crinkled; I knew a smile hid behind his medical mask.
I was left to recover for a few days. Surgery was done on my face because of the severe stretching which prolonged my recovery. But one morning I felt a pair of hands grasp over my body in my sleep, causing me to jerk awake. A weeping head laid on my chest; the familiar silver hairs instantly filled my heart to the brim with tears. I never thought I would feel my mom’s warm embrace again. I didn’t say anything; I just let the tears flow as I held her hand.
Within the same month, I was released back home. The smell of lavender lingered over the home as my mom tried her best to make my recovery as smooth as possible. she even quit her job to take care of me. I still couldn’t talk very well. The doctor said the shouting had shot my vocal cords. Even now, I still wonder what started all this. I’ll never forget the feeling of being in those walls. The sight of that boy looking into my eyes is a sorrow ill never heal from.
And even as I make tea to relax, the sound of the whistling from the teapot locks me in a trance as I listen to the whistle, awaiting that eventual Pop that never comes. Nothing will ever get those memories out of my head, even if locked away behind a mental prison. Even on the calmest days, I will sit in my room and glance at my astronaut miniature whose head still remains unfounded, and I’ll stare at its empty helmet.
The nightmarish memories that flood my head occasionally cover my right side in static and reminds me that the voice is still in there somewhere, screaming in the darkness. Sometimes, I hear the distant whispers of me as a fading hum.