Waking at three in the morning, when I tell myself “I can’t sleep again,” it sounds like someone else’s voice speaking my thoughts. This voice belongs to me, yet doesn’t belong to me at all. Where did I learn this pronunciation, from whom did I borrow this rhythm? The voice I hear when I speak to my reflection carries a different accent than the one narrating my private moments.

Someone seems to sit beside me while I think, reading my feelings aloud in their own inflection. Even the simple thought “it looks like rain today” sounds like it belongs to a person from somewhere else entirely. Sometimes soft like my mother’s voice, sometimes firm like my father’s, sometimes completely unfamiliar. In anger, this voice hardens like stone; in sadness, it breaks apart; in joy, it soars. Emotion and pronunciation shift together, as if feeling reshapes sound itself.

When I think in my native language, one voice emerges. In English, an entirely different one. Each language transforms me into a different person with a distinct personality. How many people hide within a single individual, how many voices make their home in one mind?

When someone speaks in my dreams, does that voice originate from my own head, or does it carry the authentic sound of a real person? Upon waking, I try to capture it, but it slips through my fingers like sand. Perhaps this inner voice of mine takes a thousand forms in sleep, becoming the voice of countless dream figures.

Sometimes I marvel at this voice that accompanies me from dawn to midnight, this narrator that knows my deepest secrets. Whose voice is it, really? It has spent more time with me than I have with myself, knows my hidden fears, dreams, and hopes better than I do.

When I argue with myself, I hear two distinct voices. One says “you should,” the other says “you shouldn’t.” Both are me, yet they seem like enemies to each other. Which represents my true voice, my authentic sound?

The voice I use for mental rehearsal before speaking differs so drastically from the one that actually emerges. In my inner voice, I am braver, clearer, more perfect. In my outer voice, I am hesitant, incomplete, human.

Perhaps multiple voices live within us, speaking in different accents as needed. Becoming maternal when children require comfort, becoming teacherly when explanation is needed, becoming friendly in moments of consolation. One body, one brain, but countless vocal identities.

Tonight when I close my eyes, when the day’s final thought arrives, I will hear it spoken in this familiar-yet-strange voice. The voice closest to me, yet most mysterious. The voice that is mine, yet never fully becomes mine.

This narrator has witnessed every private moment, every secret thought, every silent prayer. It has been the soundtrack to my entire inner life, yet I am only now beginning to question whose voice it actually is. Does it reflect who I truly am, or who I think I should be? Is it the accumulated echo of everyone who has ever spoken to me, or something entirely my own?

The strangest realization is this: the voice I know most intimately might be the one I understand least. It shapes how I perceive my own thoughts, colors every internal conversation, influences the very way I experience being myself. Yet its origin remains a mystery, its nature an endless question.

In the space between sleeping and waking, between thinking and speaking, between who I am and who I might become, this voice persists—constant, changing, mine, not mine, familiar as breath yet foreign as a distant star.