Growing up in Mississippi with the name, ‘Asha,’ I got used to telling people the correct pronunciation before they even asked. “It’s like Sasha, without the ‘S’,” I’d say. Otherwise I succumbed to a version of my name that sounded like “Ash,” as in ashes, as in ashes from cigarettes, and even though I have my vices, that was never one of them.
But recently, Sasha has taken on a different meaning. Sasha is the name I give to the voice I now recognize as my inner-critic. Sasha speaks in the language of “shoulds,” as in: you should workout today, and you should be making more money by now and you should be married and have kids like everyone else your age. Sasha is, quite frankly, a bitch.
I don’t know when Sasha came into my life, but it seems like she’s been with me for quite some time now. To the point where it becomes hard to distinguish her from my true self, and sometimes I start to believe her. I recognize her from when I was thirteen and trying to become smaller—she was the one telling me I shouldn’t eat that piece of pizza, and I needed to run an extra mile and do ten more crunches. I recognize her when I was eighteen and got my heart broken for the first time—she was the one telling me I wasn’t pretty enough or southern enough or outgoing enough. She makes me feel like I’m never good enough, and she loves to play the comparison game. She has very black-and-white thinking, boxes and compartmentalizes everyone, tells me that there are certain milestones you have to meet when you reach a certain age. And she reminds me that I’m not meeting them.
When I found alcohol, I realized Sasha became quieter. It was like she disappeared for stretches at a time, and in her place was a freedom and confidence I’d thought I’d lost. I started leaning on alcohol, this quick fix to drown out Sasha’s criticisms. How had I not known about this before? When I drank, it was like the sharp pointy edges of Sasha’s voice became blunted, softer. They didn’t sting as deeply or linger like a chronic ache. All of a sudden, I felt like I was finally remembering Sasha without the ‘S’—that free-spirited, confident child that I used to be.
I guess you could say that “Sasha” is my ego-self, that part of me that has picked up patterns and coping mechanisms, ways of protecting me from the intolerable emotions my sensitive self couldn’t process. And alcohol initially became a way to push down those ego voices of perfectionism and comparison. But eventually, the alcohol stopped working. Because all it was doing was acting like a band-aid to cover up these parts of me that needed to be expressed and felt. And the more I pushed these parts down and neglected them, the more they grew restless within me, with no place to dissipate. The more they started becoming fodder for Sasha to toss around when the alcohol could no longer silence her voice.
So now what I’m realizing is this: Sasha may not ever go away. But I can learn to ask her what she needs, what she’s trying to protect me from. Maybe her shoulds are a way of protecting me from what she thinks will be rejection. And maybe I just need to reassure her that I can handle whatever she thinks that rejection will be. Because when I stick to what I know to be true for me—when I lean into the “Sasha without the ‘S’” who loves creating and playing with words, the ways they can rhyme and mesh together in the most unexpected of ways; when I lean into the part of me who loves staring into a starry sky and asking all the little and big questions about the universe and life and where we go when we die; and when I lean into the part of me who finds calm in the way guitar strings press into the creases of her skin as they vibrate new sounds—when I lean into that, I know that I am exactly where I need to be in this moment. And that is all I need to be.