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This morning I sit in a small Istanbul coffee shop along the Bosphorus. The city hums and pulses around me — cars, motorbikes, trams, people rushing off to work, ferries gliding across the water, tourists drifting toward the Old City or wandering through Taksim Square. My chair is stiff. My legs ache from the twenty-five kilometers I’ve walked over the past few days. Part of me wants to lace up my shoes and walk some more, but another part knows today is for rest. Tomorrow, the Asian side of the city is calling.

No Regrets

I’m fortunate to be here — at this point in my life. Fifty-six. Still healthy. Money in the bank. I built a career in restaurants and hospitality, invested in real estate, and spent twenty-five years teaching Culinary Arts at a government college. Along the way, I’ve been lucky enough to gather a handful of good friends.

I have no second thoughts about leaving Amerikkkah. It’s no longer the country I grew up in — unrecognizable, really. I taught my students that the propaganda of the Amerikkkahn Dream was dead. You make your money, live modestly, and leave before the ground gives out beneath your feet. Life was never meant to be an endless hustle.

Inner Critic

For years I’ve sat with, listed to and battled with this voice inside me — what I’ve come to call my inner critic. I’ve worked with teachers, therapists, counselors, monks; I’ve sat in meditation halls, counseling rooms, workshops — all to better understand this particular current that runs through me.

This voice can have a harsh edge. Most people carry some version of it. We inherit it young, long before we know we’re carrying anything at all. For some of us, it grows strong early — as a survival mechanism, a way to stay small enough, careful enough, good enough to avoid the next wave of criticism waiting in the lurches. 

I’ve learned to recognize where this voice has served me well — and where it does not. It sharpens me in the kitchen, pushing me to refine a dish, finding a better balance of flavors. But it has no place in relationship between two people.

The critic whispers: You’re not good enough, they are not good enough, the world is a fucked up place. And if you make the choice to believe it, if your personality identifies with it, it shapes you — quietly, relentlessly. You don’t even realize it’s simply an internal pattern. It becomes to feel factual. Deep down, I know that voice isn’t who I am. It isn’t you either. It’s just a voice from the past.

Double Displacement

I grew up in Amerikkkah in the 1970s — a time that, in some ways, held more openness, more possibility, more freedom. But also carried its own silent weights. Nobody wanted to hear you didn’t complain. You didn’t speak of family troubles. Achievement became the measure of how people saw your worth, even your self worth. Emotional vocabulary was thin; conversations about feelings were rare. You tried to keep to yourself, handling your own business.

Now I’m in Thailand — a world entirely its own. There is a kind of beautiful harmony here, as surface as it might sometimes be, a cultural leaning toward acceptance, an ease with uncertainty. But emotions often remain unspoken, kept inside and private. The deeper work of naming, processing, and sharing feelings doesn’t always have a place. At times, it has me question the emotional intelligence of the people — though I know, again, this is my inner critic speaking too.

I find myself in a kind of double displacement. The country I knew feels unfamiliar now. The one I live in doesn’t fully match my wiring. And wherever you go, there you are — the critic still travels with me, scanning the horizon, searching for flaws, looking for danger that no longer exists.

Projections

The inner critic doesn’t limit itself to my own self. It’s not just a private voice; it extends its reach outward. It scans the world around me — people, situations, even entire cultures — searching for flaws, weaknesses, missteps. It whispers: “This isn’t right. That could fall apart. Watch out for that one.”

In some ways, it’s still trying to protect me — keeping me alert, as if constant vigilance will keep the ground steady beneath my feet. But it also distorts my vision. I sometimes find myself seeing what’s wrong before I see what’s good. In relationships, it can push me to fix, correct, or control what doesn’t actually need fixing. In new environments, like this one, it can prevent me from fully receiving what’s being offered, because part of me is always assessing whether it’s safe enough to let my guard down.

The critic projects not just self-judgment, but judgment of everything. And yet, I know: that too is an old habit, a survival pattern — not the truth.

This habit of scanning doesn’t stop with individuals. My inner critic easily projects into the wider world — onto the politics and state of affairs back in Amerikkkah, into the wars and conflicts that seem endless, into the dysfunctions of government and greed. I see clearly — sometimes too clearly — the broken machinery that powers much of modern life.

Even here, living abroad, the critic finds new territory. In Thailand, I see the shadows behind kreng jai — where harmony sometimes silences truth, where the avoidance of conflict can quietly enable power imbalances. In Istanbul, I feel the old patterns stirring again — the undercurrents of control, historical wounds, and unspoken tensions in a culture still carrying layers of empire, religion, and national identity.

The voice that follows me doesn’t just search inside — it searches everywhere. At times, it helps me see what others may not name. But often, it leaves me standing outside the flow of life, tangled in judgment, unable to fully rest inside what simply is.

The Gift & The Challenge

The world I came from taught control, improvement, self-perfection. Always find what’s wrong so you can fix it. If you miss something, the ground might give way beneath you. Self-monitoring, hyper-awareness, constant striving — this was the emotional place I came from.

Thailand offers something else entirely — acceptance, non-attachment, the release of trying to control what cannot be controlled. Small flaws are let go. Harmony is protected. Suffering comes not from imperfection, but from the refusal to accept it.

At times, people here have said to me: Why do you always look for the mistakes?
They see an old coping mechanism, a foreign habit of mind. They’re not wrong. But they don’t see where it was born.

The gift — and the challenge — are bound together. This culture might teach me how to soften the critic’s grip. If I can allow myself to absorb even a little of this gentle acceptance, I might learn to live differently.

The challenge is trust — trusting that things won’t collapse if my critic stops scanning. Allowing imperfection to live — in myself, in others, in the cultures I’ve come from and the one I now inhabit. Learning to sit quietly inside life’s uncertainty.

The work, I’ve come to see, isn’t about the impossibility of silencing the critic entirely. It’s about understanding what sits beneath its harsh voice. The critic holds pain differently than the softer, more vulnerable parts inside me. While the wounds of the past will always live inside me, the critic has taken on the power of those who once did the hurting. In that reversal, I sometimes become the one who turns that harshness inward — and at times, outward onto others. What was once done to me, I now risk doing to myself, and to the world around me.

But like the vulnerable self, the critic too can change. If I can begin to imagine that these old roles aren’t fixed — if I can practice a kind of inner flexibility — then something new becomes possible. Slowly, in small steps, a different kind of relationship can take shape between the part of me that once judged harshly and the part that longed to be protected. This is, as Process-work calls it, a “path made by walking.” And I am still walking.