Frank arrived long before I had the language for him.
He was never introduced. He never announced himself. He simply began speaking one day, somewhere between childhood and the long stretch of years that followed, that quiet corridor where most of us become who we didn’t intend to be.
A first, I mistook him for thought.
Or conscience.
Or whatever passes for instinct when you’re young and everything feels like a test you weren’t told to study for.
Frank was none of those things.
He was always here.
Irascible. Puerile. Honest. Direct.
Straight to the point, omnipresent and, he’d like to think, erudite.
He was the voice that spoke when the room emptied.
The one that stayed when everyone else left.
He had opinions about my choices, my excuses, the stories I rehearsed in the mirror. None of them were generous.
He wasn’t cruel, but he lacked the softness people tend to reserve for the versions of themselves they want to like.
Frank had no interest in the aspirational.
He trafficked in the actual.
His chatter has always filled the airwaves of my mind.
A narrator. A friend. A foe.
A ruminant, forever rummaging through my past, present, and future, leaving no stone unturned in his hunt for bullshit.
For years, we were inseparable.
Obsessed with shiny objects, we shared a relationship so close I didn’t even know he existed at all.
We were one.
Or so I thought.
But over time, through age, reflection, and the slow grind of experience, I started to notice the delay in the reflection.
A glitch in the matrix.
I became aware that we weren’t the same.
A symbiote, but not a sycophant.
He can lead or be led.
As comfortable basking in delusions of grandeur as he is mired in the banal.
The mediocre.
He doesn’t mind replaying my most cringe moments.
In fact, he’s got them on a loop.
There were years — whole seasons of my life — when I treated him like an inconvenience. Something to outrun. I filled the calendar the way people barricade doors: more meetings, longer nights, any distraction that offered temporary silence.
It didn’t work, of course. These things rarely do.
Frank was patient.
He had time.
Critical to a fault.
Endlessly self-aware. Self-analysing.
The relentless soundtrack to my life.
He’s always there, talking, like an eight-year-old shouting from another room.
Louder in silence, but never silent.
And lately, I’ve realised I’ve spent most of my life trying to drown him out.
For years, I treated Frank like background noise.
Muted him with busyness, caffeine, deadlines, distractions, and alcohol, anything that kept me from hearing him constantly.
But he doesn’t go away.
He waits. Patient. Irritating. Usually right.
And he never fucking sleeps.
He’s not self-improvement. He’s self-confrontation.
He’s the part of you that knows when you’re lying and makes your ears burn.
I used to hate him for that.
He made me uncomfortable.
He doesn’t do pep talks. He does autopsies.
He’s like a mirror that follows you everywhere.
A mirror that hears as well as it sees.
Endlessly editing and replaying, blending the real, the desired, the feared, and the imagined into one highlight reel and calling it memory.
He knows the thoughts you never say.
The names you avoid.
The promises you make to yourself in half-truths and loopholes.
He’s finely attuned to other people’s bullshit, and ruthless with mine.
We argue often.
He’s gotten me into situations where honesty felt like courage at first and idiocy five minutes later.
But that’s Frank. Allergic to diplomacy, married to the truth.
He picks apart the stories I tell myself until there’s nothing left but the truth; raw, inconvenient, undeniable.
But true? Honestly, who knows.
Not me.
Not Frank.
And the worst part?
He sounds exactly like me.
Everyone has a Frank.
You might call it conscience, intuition, self-awareness or, if you’re trying to stay detached, anxiety.
But whatever name you give it, it’s still there:
the voice that clears its throat when you say, “I’m fine.”
While most people seem to move through their lives with a gentler narrator.
Mine was frank.
Eventually I understood this wasn’t coincidence.
His name had always been inevitable.
He spoke to me on late drives, in supermarket aisles, in the blank space between notification pings. He made quiet remarks about the promises I postponed and the versions of myself I pretended were temporary. He was especially fond of pointing out the gap between what I said and what I did.
Once, standing in a kitchen lit only by the fridge, I remember hearing him say, almost gently, You already know the truth.
And the worst part was that he was right.
He always is.
Frank doesn’t care for comfort.
He doesn’t want calm.
He wants honesty, the kind that stings at first, but eventually steadies your breathing.
He’ll wait for you to slow down, to stop filling every silence with noise.
He’ll wait through every playlist, every podcast, every self-help book you download and never finish.
And then, when the noise finally fades, you’ll hear him again, that eight-year-old in the other room.
He doesn’t even notice when you’re not listening.
He’s not waiting for a reply.
It’s not a conversation.
It’s commentary.
Soft. Patient. Devastatingly accurate.
He cuts to the quick.
There came a point, I couldn’t tell you the date or the trigger, only that it was late and I was tired, when I understood Frank wasn’t the opponent. He wasn’t obstruction, or flaw, or pathology. He was the part of me that refused to participate in the polite version of my life.
The one that didn’t care about my pace or my performance.
The one uninterested in who I wished I were.
The one who remembered who I’d been all along.
Frank was never the problem.
The problem was everything I used to drown him out.
I tried to out-drink him, out-work him, out-run him.
For a while it worked, or at least it looked like it did.
But you can’t outrun a voice that lives in your head.
But Frank’s not an intruder.
He lives here.
Always has.
Peace, I’ve learned, isn’t about shutting him up.
It’s about learning what actually needs a response —
and letting the rest pass through.
Frank’s not the enemy, he’s the audit.
Every choice, every story, every justification runs through him.
He’s not cruel.
He’s just unwilling to pretend.
He’s the ghost of everything you didn’t say and the judge of everything you did.
When he finally speaks, it’s rarely profound, more often mundane.
He’ll say things like, “You already knew this.”
And the worst part is, he’s usually right.
He revisits decisions you’ve already made, rewrites history in the margins, holds post-mortems for conversations that ended five years ago.
These days, I don’t fight him as much.
We’ve reached a truce of sorts.
He gets to talk; I get to write it down.
That’s what this is
A space to stop pretending.
Just honest talk about how it actually feels to be alive, hopeful, tired, confused, grateful, sometimes all before breakfast.
Frank’s not here to fix you.
He’s here to remind you that you’re not broken, just buried under the noise.
And maybe if we can hear that voice a little more clearly, we might stop chasing the version of life that never fits.
You don’t have to agree.
This isn’t a conversation.
It’s commentary.
Come in.
Sit down.
Frank has already started talking.
This is the start of a longer, ordered body of work
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