Hearing Voices

I am a woman who hears voices.

No, I’m not crazy. I suspect if you listened closely too, you would hear them in your life as well.

Sometimes, when I’m talking to someone who loves me, I hear them over the years. The voices rise up from the ground like little snakes, tempting me back to old insecurities and dark moments.

Case in point: that one time my dad, the retired software developer, interrupted me to say: “You’re just the new PM, Genevieve, you don’t know what you’re talking about. The developers know what they are doing.”

And I heard all the voices. All the many, many voices of men in my life previously. My three brothers and dad, the engineers and responsible men that they are.

“Genevieve, maybe you should take a debate class.”

“Genevieve, if you major in English, you won’t make any money.”

“You should think about taking a computer science class.”

“Have you tried an engineering class?”

“What about computer science, though?”

“So, what are you going to do now that you’ve left the honors program? Just be an English major?”

I heard all those voices in the space of like .3 seconds.

And I also did an insanely fast assessment of the work situation I had been verbally processing before my dad interrupted me.

I know the data down to the ground because I’m Catholic. It’s complicated data because…complicated Catholic reasons.

They actually HADN’T known what they were doing. The CEO had rebuked them for it.

Here I am just trying to get out there and be successful and make some money and pay off my loans and I had worked so hard to prove all my brothers and dad wrong and be successful despite being an English major and use all the advice the profs had given us at school about getting out there and getting jobs because there’s so much anxiety in the English department about success and here he was underestimating my intelligence yet again and and and and…

Well, that insanely fast assessment led to an intense argument.

But, by the grace of God, after I begged understanding and went to Confession, I realized some things.

Anyway, now, when I talk to my dad, I just take his words as given, I figure he’s just straight up asking a question he wants an answer to or wondering about, and he loves me, and if he’s wrong, I will calmly explain it to him to the umpteenth degree analytically, and then if he has a good counterpoint, we will debate it until we are satisfied.

Catholics are very big on logic and debate.

Because in the end, men are so simple, so straightforward, just like kisses — they just keep it simple, stupid.