The Second-Person Internal Monologue

On framing devices, detached first-person narrators, and fake shower arguments.

This essay began as a thought in my head. I do not mean that I had a thought, which I then wrote down. I mean that the thought existed in the form of an imaginary essay, composed for an imaginary audience. I think that, in my imagination, I was reading rather than writing this essay.

After some time, I stopped and realized that I was thinking in an essay form (I’ve been trying to train myself to take notice of this, the way you can train yourself to recognize when you’re in a dream). Only then did I decide to turn the imaginary essay into a real essay for a real audience.

There’s been lots of discourse lately about internal monologues. Some of it is very stupid, operating on a binary that certainly doesn’t correspond to the real, complex interlacing of language and thought in the mind (Can you believe that some people have NO internal monologue?, etc., without bothering to define what that means, and with the implication that such a person has no interiority at all). But there’s also been some fascinating, nuanced conversation about the different ways we do or do not use language to think, and it’s caused me to consider how exactly my own internal monologue works.

I began trying to step back and observe my own patterns of thinking, which is not easy. The second you try to look directly at your thoughts they melt away or stiffen awkward little positions. For a while, I didn’t think of myself as having much of an “internal monologue.” When I hear others talk about their own internal monologues, I usually do not relate. I got the impression that they were living with a constant disembodied voice, which narrated in a kind of context-free, audience-free, freewheeling voice-over.

It’s possible that I misunderstood these descriptions or interpreted them too literally—but in any case, they didn’t resonate with my own experience of being a conscious person. 

Later, I realized that I do in fact think in language. But what I experience is closer to an internal dialogue than an internal monologue. That is to say, I am almost always speaking to some kind of imagined audience. Sometimes, I imagine the thought as an essay. Sometimes (and this is humiliating) I imagine that I am explaining my thoughts in a TikTok. Sometimes I imagine that I am at dinner with friends, telling them some kind of story. I imagine I am being interviewed. I imagine I am texting my best friend or my partner. I imagine I am speaking to a therapist (I do not, in fact, have a therapist). I imagine that I am keeping a diary (I do not keep a diary). I imagine, sometimes, in another person’s voice: a friend tells me an outlandish story, and then I imagine reading that story in a newspaper.