Lia Declan's Musings

Why I Write

The Voice That Hunts Me

It begins with nothing. A vibration. A notification. A message past bedtime. It doesn’t need a reason, or a door, only a crack.

Then it speaks.

“You screwed up again.”
“They’re angry. You said something wrong.”
“You’re too much. You’re not enough.”
“Here’s every possible failure. Every imagined consequence. Every way you will be abandoned and discarded.”

It’s relentless. It lays out my flaws in great detail, like I actually asked for them. It knows how to twist silence into shame. My body responds. Nausea fills my stomach. Knots tighten my chest. Heat rises in my face, and then tears start to fall. My head pounds, and my breath quickens. I run to the toilet, as if purging the panic might help me.

I want to respond, but it’s faster… Louder. It knows my soft spots, and it knows how to make me flinch. It comes harder when I’m alone. Amplifying every doubt until my thoughts become a labyrinth with no exits. It conjures memories I’d rather forget, and highlights regret in audible colours.

Outside, the world moves on like I don’t exist. There’s laughter on the other side of the doors, and beams of sunlight crawl across the floor like a demon from one of my stories. Inside, the voice multiplies, echoing off the walls of my mind, splitting me from the present.

My hands tremble and start to shake. I grab the countertop and ground myself in its solid reality beneath my fingers. I whisper counterspells: “I am safe. This is a feeling, not a fact.” The words land softly. Easily brushed aside by the storm inside, but I say them anyway.

There are moments when the voice falters, when breath returns, and the fog thins. In those rare silences, I remember myself: the pulse in my wrist, the rise and fall of my chest with each breath, the stubborn hope stitched into my very being. I remember that it is only a voice, not a prophecy.

Still, I listen for the silence that follows, the promise of peace. And I wait, aching, for my own voice to answer back. Silently screaming inside.

There is no silence. The storm doesn’t pass. It churns relentlessly, a demonic howl in my head. My thoughts stutter over themselves, colliding and fracturing, a hundred voices shouting all at once. I pace the room, fingers digging into my palms. The feeling is like boulders sitting in my throat. Each moment is a collision, memory against fear, shame against hope, panic against the desperate desire to try.

The world outside is a cruel joke, orderly, predictable, nothing like the inside of my skull. My heart skips, races, stumbles, and I can’t find the rhythm. I try calming myself, anchoring to the present, but the ground wavers under me. The countertop is slick with sweat from my grip, my knuckles achy, white and bloodless.

Only when I’m writing does the noise quiet. There, words spill out faster than I can catch them, the only thread of peace I get. I write because it’s the one place the voice stutters and hesitates, unsure. Each sentence is a gasp of air between crashing waves, a desperate bid for order in the chaos. But when the words pause, it presses in, circling, waiting for my keys to slip, for doubt to reclaim the page.

There is no peace, just this constant, wild urgency, the ache for escape, and the feverish hope that maybe… just maybe, in the frantic scramble of language, I can carve out a moment that’s mine.

I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know what it is, or what it wants. The voice is taunting. Panicked. Desperate. Never angry, always fearful. Always worried, frantic.

It chatters endlessly in a register only I can hear, a crackling insistence woven through every thought, relentless in its uncertainty. It asks questions I cannot answer, what if, what if, what if, until my muscles coil tight, braced for dangers I cannot see, and may never come. It rehearses disaster like a ritual, folding worry into every corner of my mind. And when I try to reason with it, it only grows more frantic, more insistent, a shadow pacing the perimeter of my awareness.

Sometimes, I wonder whether it is trying to protect me, some ancient instinct clinging to the edges of survival. It warns me of things that might never come, invents catastrophes out of the tiniest tremors. It convinces me that vigilance is safety, that if I’m just careful enough, if I can anticipate every blow, I’ll be spared the sting of surprise.

But I’m not spared. I’m haunted. I move through rooms with my shoulders hunched, scanning for threats I can’t name. I play out conversations before they happen and imagine every possible mistake, every small humiliation magnified. My heart pounds in the quiet, in the crowded spaces, in the lamplight at midnight.

I keep searching for the logic, the root, the way to quiet this constant refrain. I press ice to my wrists, breathe deep, count backward from ten, then try again from a hundred. I write lists, reassure, bargain with Loki, plead to Frigg. Still, the worry seeps through, persistent and uninvited, swimming around in my chest.

I want to tell someone, to ask for a map out of this maze. But the words shrink in my mouth, unconvincing even to myself. Who would understand this trembling urgency, this tireless imagination? So I sit, I write, I wait for the hush that never comes. The world outside spins on, sun rising and setting, while inside, the voice still quivers, afraid of everything, afraid of nothing, afraid of the next breath, and the one after that.

I hurt the person I care about, because I can’t be ‘normal’, happy, like I was when we first met. She wants me back. I don’t know who I am, or who I was then. I know who I was when I was born. I know who I was taught to be, but that is not me. Or, is it?

The ache of her disappointment settles in my mind, another weight I can’t shake off. I watch her search my face for the person they remember, the person who laughed easily, who fit comfortably into the softness of her world. I want to reach back, to cup that memory in my hands, to resurrect some version of myself that would make her sorrow dissolve. But whatever mask I wore then has cracked and slipped, pieces scattered in the raging storm that churns inside me. All I can say is, “What?”

I try to remember sunlight on new grass, the untroubled laughter of someone unfractured. But it feels like a story I once heard, or a dream slipping out of reach at dawn. I can’t retrace the path to that earlier self. I wonder if that person ever existed, or if I was only ever a practised performance, learning the right lines, the right gestures, the right way to nod and smile. Maybe I was always borrowing shapes, piecing myself together from the expectations handed down by others, hoping that if I wore them well enough, I’d eventually become real.

But I’m not sure who is underneath, or what remains when the borrowed lines fade. I know how to apologise, to say I’m sorry for the hurt I cause, for the distance that grows each day between what she wants and who I am. I wonder if loving me means loving a mirage, a shimmer on the horizon that dissolves when approached.

Sometimes I wish I could step out of my own mind, slip into the easy certainty of another life. To be the person I was supposed to be, the version everyone hopes for, dependable, bright, untangled. Instead, I stand here, uncertain, voice trembling when I try to explain the ache and the fear, the hunger for escape from the endless maze of my own thoughts.

Is it possible to reclaim a self that never truly was? Or am I only circling the same question, lost between the memory of someone softer and the reality of a mind in constant motion? I want so much to be enough, for her, for myself, but the shape of enough keeps changing, receding like the tide. I ask myself, again and again: Is this me? Or am I only the echo of what I was taught to be, the residue of other people’s wishes, layered over the raw material of who I might become?

I don’t have an answer. All I have is this, an open notebook, trembling hands, and the stubborn hope that if I keep writing, keep searching, maybe I’ll carve out a space where I can be, unmasked and uncertain, and maybe that will be enough.

The worlds I create, the characters, all extensions of myself in some way. Each represents a voice in my head.

One is the brave one, always speaking first, always reaching out, daring to be seen. Another folds in on themself, a shadow at the edge of every page, more comfortable in the margins than in the spotlight. There’s the sceptic, eyes narrowed, forever questioning the ground beneath their feet. And then, the dreamer, feet barely touching that same ground, sketching escape routes in the sky. Sometimes they quarrel, sometimes they console, but always, they orbit the same uncertain centre: me.

Through them, I test the boundaries, write myself into courage, or into forgiveness, or even into a fleeting peace. I let them say the words I cannot, make choices I fear, love and lose and rage and hope with a clarity that slips through my fingers in the waking world. Their wants and wounds echo my own, but refracted, rendered in new colours. They offer me distance and intimacy all at once, a way to hold my pain and wonder at arm’s length, or cradle it more gently than I ever could in plain daylight.

Sometimes I think each story is a map, not out of the maze, but through it. Each character is a torch flickering in the dark. They don’t always lead me to answers, but they keep me moving, keep me reaching into corners I might otherwise avoid. In the act of creation, I find a fragile kind of belonging: not to the world as it is, but to the world as it might be, stitched together from fragments of memory, longing, and raw invention.

Perhaps, in time, these voices will harmonise, perhaps one day I’ll recognise them not as strangers but as facets of a self still forming, still reaching for its own name. Until then, I’ll let them speak. I’ll let the worlds bloom and unravel, each one a question, each one a hope. And in the quiet after the last line falls away, maybe, just maybe, I’ll hear something true, soft and honest, and wholly my own.

My hands hover over the page. Words spill out, half confessions, half pleas. I write to quiet the panic, believing that if I can name the chaos, I might survive it. But the tangle persists, and the hope flickers: Something I can’t bring myself to extinguish.

I don’t know how to be the person I wish I were, but I know how to endure, how to reach with trembling hands for whatever light remains. And so, I remain tangled, panicked, still searching. But I do not stop. I cannot. Maybe I should. Beneath the chaos, something in me insists: keep writing, keep dreaming, keep moving, even if the destination is unknown.

I build worlds of fantasy, worlds of acceptance, worlds of normality, as if such a thing even exists. I fight demons, or I embrace them. I defy the gods and become something more, unraveling destinies that, for a moment, feel pliant under my pen. I live lives of peace and contentment, or I wage battles, wars of the spirit or the heart or the arm. Through it all, there is a grounding force. Someone who keeps me going. I write her in, because I need her.

She is hope made manifest, sometimes fierce, sometimes gentle, sometimes no more than a silhouette on the horizon. She is the voice that steadies my own when it falters, the memory of laughter in darker chapters, the hand that brushes away the gathering dust. I invent her because I long for a compass… a constant… a guardian spirit woven from longing and memory. In places where loneliness thickens, she arrives, a presence conjured from words and want, a sanctuary I can return to when I am lost.

So I continue, tangled, broken, writing her into every world I build. Through her, I remember that love, imagined or real, can be a lantern, a thread leading me home. And in the trembling dark, I follow, page after page, trusting that if I keep writing, maybe, I will find myself.

I reach for her, the hope I shaped with words, but she is silent now, unreachable. There are no lines to cross, no keys to press, no world to bend to my longing.

And though I do not know what to do, though the next line eludes me, I promise quietly, if only to myself: when the darkness fades, even a little, I will begin again. But I’m lying. I don’t begin again, I don’t stop. I never stop. The voices never quiet. Only when I sleep, and not always then. But I don’t sleep long. A few hours. Maybe. Something wakes me and the voices… they are always there. And now, I’m no longer tired enough to sleep.

And somewhere, faint as dawn behind black clouds, I sense the shape of her, my compass, my echo. She’ll be here soon. I’ll watch her, listen, apologise again and again. Maybe she will say or do something that gives me a new story to write. When the day is over, and she prepares to leave, I promise her… and myself: tomorrow, we will try again.