Like Listening to Your Own Voice

I had never really liked him. I did not have any obvious or compelling reason not to like him, and why I disliked him had been a question that had bugged me for some time. I had come up with some answers, some more reasonable than others, but today I think I found an answer that appears to be the most likely of the lot.

Listening to your own voice

“Listening to your own voice,” she said, “is like eeeeeeeee…”

We were testing my MP3 player’s voice recording function, and playing back our voices on the computer. The moment she said this, I started wondering why. It wasn’t just her, but me as well, that couldn’t quite stand the sound of their own recorded voice.

I’d always found that my voice sounded terrible when recorded. It wasn’t so much the difference per se, for I knew that I was going to sound different when listening to the playback of my own voice, but that it simply sounded bad.

It wasn’t only until I started practising speaking through a microphone, honing my voice to suit what I thought I should sound like that I started finding my own voice acceptable.

I guess the point I am trying to drive at with this analogy is that it was so much easier to hear the flaws in my own voice through the recording and subsequent playback of my own speech.

Watching the self

When I see him, I see me. He, the person I dislike, tends to remind me of myself. I find so many parallels between us that it’s scary.

So my mind is saying, “if you share so many characteristics, you must be like him in every other way.”

But when I look at him, I do not like what I see… not at all! I see ill-discipline; I see cunning; I see sloth.

And when I think about what my mind is saying, I start thinking that what I’m seeing are things — characteristics — that are latent within me.

And I get scared.

I tell myself that I cannot be like that.

And disliking him is simply my way of disliking the self I do not wish to become.