The inner critic and me

I've been living with a harsh inner critic as long as I can remember. I don't know exactly when it formed, and I'm still not really sure how, but I can trace its presence back to when I was 17 or 18 years old. It may have changed its tone, its way of approaching me or bringing me down, but it has always been there.

Maybe I had this voice even when I was younger, but I didn't have too many responsibilities or much self-knowledge to care, so probably that's it.

Why do I say when I was 17, 18? Because I definitely remember how I was treating myself when I was preparing for the entrance exam. In Iran, you take part in an entrance exam when you're 18, a 4 hour session that's supposed to depict your future. At least that's how it's sold.

I should mention something here, because it matters later. I love writing. I probably got this habit from my dad (may he rest in peace). When I want to think, I write everything down, so I usually have loads of random pages of written stuff all around me (well now, it's all on a tablet, but like millions of pages of notes). Back then, that writing was where the voice lived loudest.

I remember, when I was 17, preparing for the entrance exam, the notes were full of sentences like this:

You're stupid, why don't you know this?

How can you get this wrong, everybody knows this, shame.

Everyone is better than you, you'll amount to nothing.

Familiar? Hope not, but if you're reading this, it probably tells you similar stuff.

This harsh voice with these harsh tones followed me into university. Even though I managed to get a relatively good score in the entrance exam and get into the best university in the country, the voice didn't really care. Now it was about university exams, finding friends, proving myself to colleagues, being popular. Different sentences, but again with one motivation. To crush me and bring me down.

I wasn't writing these harsh voices down anymore, because that gave them more power, but it was still there. Now that I was living in another city, far from my family and the things I knew, the voice was much, much stronger. I couldn't really control it. For one thing, I didn't have any knowledge about a critical inner voice back then. I thought it was right, telling me the truth, trying to push me in the correct direction. Well, maybe we can say it was, but when we're in control of it, not under attack.

There was something underneath all this that I didn't understand yet. I am bipolar, though I wasn't diagnosed at 18, and not getting the medication at the time made things catastrophic. How catastrophic? I was on the verge of ki*ing myself when I was around 18-19.

The bipolar and the voice are two separate things, but they're connected: because the bipolar was already there, the voice had more room to play. More raw material to work with, more ways to make everything feel worse than it already was.

We managed to get me diagnosed and I was able to bring myself back, but the voice? It was still there. It may have had one of its hands cut off, but it had many more.

I want to be clear that life kept handing the voice material. I got cancer when I was 22, before I had even met my wife. So by my early twenties I had already been to a place most people don't see for decades, and the voice was right there for all of it.

The next hard stretch was when I was a bit older, around 25-26, when my wife and I were moving to Turkiye for her PhD studies. My choices then were to try to find a job in a country where I didn't know the language yet, a country not too kind on expats (work-wise), with a voice that now kept telling me I couldn't do it.

Telling me everyone learned a language you didn't, found a job you couldn't, are having fun while you're sad and stressed at home, you don't know things, you're not smart, you're not curious, you're not …

Still, this voice didn't have a name for me. I was still thinking that this is just me, this is the truth of life, I have to listen to it. The result was that I was generally not a happy person, while the truth is I'm a very lively, fun person. I completely forgot who I really was, and the environment was not helping me at all. I wasn't really fortunate with what was happening to me anyway, so the voice had a lot of room to appear.

I now know clearly that when I'm not feeling well, or in a stressed crisis mode, the voice will trigger all my insecurities and know exactly how to crush me. And at the time, living in Turkiye, everything was crisis mode. I had to keep changing jobs because projects kept ending. We had to keep moving houses because landlords wanted to sell them. I didn't have much of a network because of the language. I was insecure, and my more stable job was remote work with Canada, so I didn't really need to leave the house. On top of all this, I had an abdominal adhesions surgery at 27. Every one of these was real, and the voice used every one of them.

It was in Turkiye that I first tried to fight back in any real way. I went back to writing, but this time I turned it against the voice instead of letting it carry the voice. I started keeping a list of notes on my phone: the things the voice says, how they make me feel, and the answers to each one. Because here's the thing about the voice. It isn't exactly lying. It talks from facts, gives verdicts based on things that actually happened. But it stacks the deck. It only shows the bad, hides everything good you've ever done, and never gives you a chance to defend yourself. The notes were the defense. The evidence it refuses to enter. So when the voice got strong, I'd go through the list, read all of it, and try to calm myself down. It helped, to some extent. But the notes were static. They couldn't talk back, couldn't meet me where I was that day, so they could only take me so far.

So I'm not saying I have a harsh critic and a normal life. I definitely had a hard one. But the main thing I understood during all this time is that my real problem with the voice was that I didn't know what it was. Every time I named it (I did a couple of times when I was in Turkiye) I thought I'd had a eureka moment, but I lost it again because the voice was too strong and I couldn't handle it.

When I say naming it, I don't mean giving it some character. I mean just understanding that it exists, that it's not something mythical or magical. When it talks, you can say, "oh, it's the inner voice again," and that small move makes it easier to handle, because you stop taking it personally. It's tied to a source you can see, instead of being the truth about you. Easier said than done, of course. I still struggle with it.

So when did things actually start to change? Strangely, when everything fell apart at once. Around June 2025, my wife and I went on a pause in the relationship because it wasn't working. Why wasn't it working? Because of all the things I've mentioned. The voice managed to completely defeat me. I was long distance in a relationship, couldn't find a proper home, and in the middle of job hunting with nowhere to land. I became a shell of myself under everything happening to me, and the voice always says, it's all your fault. Everything going on is your fault. Relationship issues, job insecurities, everything.

And I exploded.

Couldn't take it anymore. That was the bottom, and I'm sure I had to be pushed all the way there before anything could change. I don't know exactly how it happened, but that was the moment I came out the other side. I told myself:

There has to be more to this life than being this miserable, this can't really be it. I'm going through a lot, and maybe it's time for once to take care of myself.

And that's how I started doing a simple exercise.

Exercise? Telling myself nothing is my fault.

Nothing, nada. Job, relationship, nothing.

I was always afraid that if I did this, I'd lose perspective and responsibility. That I'd become someone who blames the world and never looks at himself. But where had the other way gotten me? Someone always worried, stressed, down, depressed, who looked at himself so hard there was nothing left. So what's the worst thing that can happen here? I decided to find out.

And that's when I built the thing that actually helped me most, aside from my therapy. I took everything I used to keep in those static notes and put it into something that could answer back. It began as a simple GPT bot, somewhere I could say the harsh things out loud and not have them just run loose in my head, somewhere I could actually handle them. Where the notes could only sit there, this could meet me, push back, talk to me. It covered everything the notes list used to do, and a lot more.

I kept doing this, and kept doing this. Not once, not as a single breakthrough, but every day, badly at first, for short stretches at a time. And slowly it worked. I was a different person a month later, not because anything in my life had gotten easier, but just by being kinder to myself.

Is the voice here? Yes, it's here. It will probably follow me to the grave. I still fall in times of crisis, when the voice is stronger, but the only difference is that now I manage to name it. I bounce back sooner than before, whatever happens in my life.

And life kept testing that. Since then, I got cancer for the second time. I was 33, three months before writing this, and it landed in the middle of a divorce that's still going on as I write. Around the same time I got a job offer that was taken back a week later, on top of millions of rejections, and I still don't have a proper one.

But I'm here.

That GPT bot became this website. It's saved me countless times this past year, and maybe it can help you too. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.