Maribel speaks to herself slowly and carefully, as if she’s measuring out what other people are saying. She makes many lists to remind her to do certain actions, so I would say she is compassionate to her ability to learn. She shows delayed understanding of situations, so sometimes she asks people to repeat what they have said so she can write them down for reference. I would say making lists, although odd to strangers, would have helped her remember the names and addresses of the people close to her.

My inner voice is not at all similar because I hate making lists that jump from one thought to another. Instead, I write in prose form most of the time, and let my mind wander off to various topics at leisure. This helps me to relax and to focus better on something more important, such as listening to a teacher. Of course, there are times when my attention needs to be given more than 100%, such as when I’m taking a test, in which case I won’t be able to free-write. But free-writing would probably be good preparation for a test, and I try to do it on my weekends, in addition to sleeping in. Free-writing may be more important than sleeping in to my brain health. I prefer napping to sleeping in anyway.

In short, I don’t talk to myself very much, unless it is a flight of the fancy when I am looking at a future, more sophisticated version of myself who handles situations much better than I can currently. In that case, I imagine the kind of things I would say to the people I know now, and how I would act all superior in subtle means. Other times, I freeze up out of nervousness that I’m doing something wrong in the present, which is no help to anyone. I should try to fix this habit, which was probably born out of how I was raised. Before college, I didn’t feel like I had much freedom at all.

College is definitely helping me to master my internal dialogue, because though I wasn’t particularly plagued with it in the first place, I have more opportunity to let my thoughts roam, and looking at the world around me is for me an aspect of internal dialogue.  Since no one is breathing down my back about the various choices I make, I feel less inclined to hesitate before jumping in the boat with others. And if my imagination is just another healthy way for my subconscious desires to surface, then I will keep it flowing.

Therefore, there are two main ways that my internal dialogue is helping me now and one way I can improve on.

The girls around me don’t talk to me much, but sometimes they try to impress me by telling of the same high school experience – banal topics like what their experience on drugs were, for example. I have a quality about me that can bring out more insightful experiences with people than they would otherwise share with me. I was at Trader Joe’s asking a salesperson where the fruit and veggie cleaner was when she started talking about her mother’s traditional apple cider vinegar.

I like to think of myself as a chameleon, weaving myself in and out of the different fabrics of people’s existence. Casual conversation is an aspect that would have made high school more interesting, but I don’t doubt I will have a lack of it here. I can also use my love of people to create study groups which weren’t possible in high school. In study groups, we will explore the variation of human thought on a single idea.

I do not want to be a mathematician who gets paid to sit at a desk. If I have to, I will talk to the next generation of students. It is mean to copy people’s work, but just as artists borrow techniques that are thousands of years old, so will I borrow from other people to find the most efficient solution to any math problem. For now, I apply myself to the humdrum routine I’ve almost gotten used to as a two-month-old adult. Once the boring bit is over, as in the solo trips to the library poring over unfingered textbooks, I want to be able to point to someone I know and say, “See, we studied this in class!” and hold up a pinecone (to demonstrate the Fibonacci sequence or some other sequence I haven’t learned yet).