The first one we call "conscience". It is that quiet voice that follows you everywhere, the one tied to your ethics, your faith, and everything you were raised on. It is the part of me that knows right from wrong before my mind even catches up. Honestly, I am grateful for this one. It has kept me a good person, someone I am genuinely proud to be, and it steers me away from the things that would upset God or leave me uneasy in my own soul. I would never want to quiet that voice.
The second one though... let us just say we have a more complicated relationship. This one is tied to how I see the world and what I expect from myself. On my worst days I have a few names for her that I will keep to myself, but let us politely call her Little Miss Never-Enough.
She is relentless. She whispers, and on bad days shouts: you should be working harder, you should have achieved more by now, stop pouring yourself into everyone else and focus on your own career, on the dreams you set for yourself when you were young. And here is the thing, she is also the reason I succeed. She is why I became known among the people around me as "Dima, wherever you put her, she manages." You will find me thriving in Quality Assurance one day and in Development the next, and if I ever decided to switch careers entirely, I know I could pull that off too. That drive is hers.
But she has a darker side. Sometimes I push myself so hard that she stops lifting me and starts dragging me down instead. On those days she is the voice I just want to slap quiet, because rather than motivating me she is draining me and pulling me somewhere low. She is loudest when I look around and see people my age achieving the very things I know I could have achieved, but didn't.
If she were a person, she would be a mini me. A younger version of myself holding a little stick, poking and prodding me forward. On my overwhelmed days that stick feels like she is hurtling me down a hill I never asked to run. But on my calm days, that same stick is exactly what holds me upright. Because deep down, the very voice that exhausts me is also the one that has carried me this far.
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And after living with all of that noise, the two voices constantly chasing me, the endless little voices of my kids, and the general chaos of this daily world we live in, you can probably imagine how much I crave real rest.
For me, true rest is nothing fancy. No grand vacation, nothing big. It is something very simple. It is a quiet moment completely to myself, sitting alone on the terrace on a rainy day, a warm cup of coffee in my hands, cuddled up under a blanket, just listening to the rain and letting my mind finally go quiet. No one calling my name, no critic whispering, nothing to fix or manage. Just me and the sound of the rain. That is my kind of heaven.
The hard part is the guilt. As a mom and a wife, sitting still can feel almost wrong, like there is always something I should be doing instead, a chore, a task, someone who needs me. Little Miss Never-Enough loves to show up right when I try to relax and list off everything I have left undone. For the longest time, rest felt like something I had to earn, never something I was simply allowed to have.
What I am slowly learning is that rest is not a prize for finishing everything, because the truth is the list never ends. So I am trying to give myself permission to pause without apologizing for it, to remember that I cannot pour from an empty cup, and that a rested me is a far better mom, wife and person than an exhausted one running on fumes. Some days the guilt still creeps in, but I am learning to sit with my coffee anyway, and let the rain do the rest.
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Cover image generated by me using Gemini
