About this time, three years ago, a voice I tried for a long time to block out whispered in the dead of night at the very back of my brain, that this really wasn’t right, and it really, REALLY couldn’t go on much longer.

It was the beginning of the end of my marriage.

I’ve learned in the intervening three years to listen to that voice a lot more.

I think it saved me.

I’ll always remember a story a probation officer friend of mine tells, about a lad she was working with, who finally admitted to her one day that he heard voices in his head. After some probing (the chief job of a probation officer) she worked out he was actually talking about his THOUGHTS.

And when she told him that’s what everyone hears when they think without saying the words aloud, he cried.

Possibly he cried because he wasn’t mad, after all. But I like to think he cried more because she had given him HIM.

You see, the voice in your head is the real you. In all your glory and hideousness and joy and despair and spiralling, kaleidoscopic iterations. It is your conscience, your inner monologue, your instincts, your raw, gut feelings.

YOU.

And when you stop listening to the voice, when you become disconnected, you can get very, very lost.

Sometimes it is trampled down, or quieted, or ignored. The things it’s telling you are too hard to hear so you pretend you don’t. You avoid, and numb, and mask, and redirect. You tell your own story loudly over the top.

Sometimes you are just too busy or too damn tired to listen anymore.

Sometimes it is undermined. You are taught that it cannot be trusted, that it is wrong, and you are wrong, and the voice in your head slowly becomes someone else’s, instead. Overruled. Replaced.

When I started listening to the voice in my head again after a very, very long time, it was like taking off ear defenders in the middle of a concert.

The thoughts I had were new and jagged and disturbing and poured in like an avalanche. My instincts were raw. They were BIG. The feelings I’d ignored or battened down were BIG. My own reality knocked me over and tore me up and I was filled and hollowed out on painful repeat, again and again.

I think the hardest bit was trusting the voice.

I’d lost my confidence. I still believed him over me. I thought all my thoughts and feelings were wrong – but also KNEW they weren’t – and I couldn’t reconcile the gap.

God, there were so many gaps, back then. Between fact and fiction and experience and representation – and I fell hard into every one. I’d lost what was real, what was true. MY truth. I’d lost me.

I didn’t believe me, or believe in me, and I was desperate to BE believed, to be seen.

I spent a long time looking for validation – searching for people to hear my voice, recognise it, confirm it, confirm ME. But no one could ever give me what I needed, could ever believe me enough.

Gradually, slowly, and very much to my surprise, I have grown to trust myself.

I look up now, look back, and I trust my own experience, and my own eyes, and my own evidence, and my own feelings.

My own voice.

I find I have very nearly reached the point where the only person I need to believe me, is me.

I am enough for me.

I have given me, myself.

And just like my friend’s probationer, finding ME has saved me.

Being at peace with the voice in my head, being able to tap into my instincts, being able to TRUST them, is one of the best feelings I have ever known.

In the last three years, I have learned to listen to myself.

I have learned to reflect on myself, and my motivations.

I have learned to be both self critical, and kind.

I have learned to seek truth, and evaluate it.

I have learned to be (mostly) honest with myself, for perhaps the first time in my life.

I have learned to grit my teeth through the big waves and wait – wait to hear the thoughts beneath the feelings.

And I have learned to let the thoughts settle before I act. At least sometimes (okay it’s still a work in progress).

I have learned that when I am truly me, when I listen, I am POWERFUL.

I think women have become very used to not being heard. To not being listened to. To losing our voices in the world – to being told they don’t matter.

It would be nice to think the voice in your head can’t be taken from you – but it’s clearly more complicated than that. Life creeps in and creeps up on you and suddenly you’re disconnected from who thought you were, from your thoughts themselves.

But if you can tune back in to your inside voice, and believe it, that’s when you can use it outside, loud and clear – and BE believed.

That’s when our voices are strong enough, true enough, powerful enough, to be heard.

Being YOU is superpower.

And maybe by tapping into it we can save not just ourselves, but the world.