My Inner Critic Got Me Places

Inspired by a conversation with Peter Mukherjee.

I was 22, sleeping at a family friend’s house in Rabat the night before my big move to Paris. At 5 a.m., I sat up in bed with my eyes wide open, just like in the movies.

I remembered the paper.

My dad had spent weeks building my visa application. He’d gathered every document, navigated every line at every office, asked me a hundred times to please pay attention. “If you worked for me…” he kept saying, “we would not get along.”

He finally handed me one important document to present at a specific immigration office in Paris with one instruction: take it to Paris. Don’t lose it.

What did I do instead? While I was packing, I looked at the file, didn’t recognize it, and tossed it in the trash. Just like that.

Somehow, the paper got rescued (filled with tomato sauce) and I got to live in Paris, but man, did I get in trouble for that one…

So yeah, that was 22-year-old me. Careless, distracted, and somehow always one tomato stain away from disaster.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Peter Mukherjee invited me on his podcast. He’s the writer behind A Few Wise Words, and one of the people who makes Substack feel like a lovely neighborhood. He asked me to walk him through my journey, from that careless girl to who I am today. He asked about being a highly sensitive person, about the small habits that work, about what emotional intelligence actually means in daily life. I’ll share the full conversation at the bottom of this piece.

Of everything we talked about, I noticed a thread: The cost of who I became.

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A few years after the tomato sauce incident, the careless girl was gone.

In her place was someone who never forgot a document. Never missed a deadline. Never let anything slip. I’d become the kind of person my dad had been trying to raise. Reliable and sharp.

But the voice that built this new version was not kind.

How could you be so stupid? Are you serious right now? You’re so dumb. That kind of voice, running in the background all day, every day.

It made me thorough and good at my job. Someone people trusted with the paperwork and the deadlines. From the outside, I looked like I’d grown up. From the inside, I was constantly bracing.

I told myself it was working. And, yes, in a way, it was.

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The inner critic had a plan

Here’s the thing: my inner critic wasn’t cruelty for its own sake. It was a specific strategy with a specific goal: Keep me out of trouble.

The logic went like this: if I am hard enough on myself, I won’t become her again.

Her, the careless girl. The one who throws important things in the trash. The one who needs her dad to rescue her. That one.

The harsh voice was the protection system I’d built to improve, and it did its job.

But it charged me a price I couldn’t see at the time.

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The avoidable cost

The cost wasn’t just feeling tired or anxious, though it was that too. The deeper cost was something I only understood years later.

Harshness keeps you small.

When you spend a decade expecting to get punished for every mistake, your shoulders start hunching toward your ears. You walk through your work life with your head slightly down. You take fewer risks, because risks are mistakes waiting to happen. You stop volunteering for the thing you’re not sure you can do, because if you fail at it, the voice will be relentless.

You can perform like this. You can perform really well, actually. Plenty of high-achievers run on this exact engine.

But you can’t shine. You can’t experiment and take up the kind of space that real growth requires. Because all of that demands an inner space where you’re allowed to be a beginner. And the harsh voice… it doesn’t like beginners. It eats beginners for breakfast.

The truth is I was overpaying for performance. Getting good results, yes. But paying with my nervous system, my creativity, my willingness to try things. Paying with the version of me who could have been bolder, more curious, more at ease.

And here’s the part that took me years to accept: I would have performed even better without it.

The whip wasn’t earning me anything I couldn’t have obtained for free.

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Listen to the full conversation 👇🏼

Peter and I talked about my path from Morocco to San Sebastian, the moment I realized at 32 that I’m a highly sensitive person, the small daily habits that make a difference, why emotional intelligence might be the most important skill nobody teaches us, and the one thing I’d change about the world if I could.

Peter is a generous host and such a thoughtful interviewer. He has more of these episodes coming as part of his Substack-Luminary Interviews, so if you enjoy this kind of slow, honest conversation, his Substack is worth your time.

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If you’re reading this and there’s a voice in your head right now that already wants to argue, that says you do need the harshness, that without it you’d suck at everything, I understand.

I lived inside that voice for years.

All I’ll say is this: Try one week of speaking to yourself the way you’d speak to someone you love. Just as an experiment. I know it’ll change your life.

The careless girl is still in me, by the way. She still forgets and messes up. But these days, the voice that meets her is much kinder. And she’s much happier for it.

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If you've been suspecting that the way you talk to yourself is costing you more than it's giving, that's exactly the kind of pattern I help my 1:1 clients with. If you'd like to think it through with someone who'll ask the right questions, here's how we'd start.

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💬 Tell me, what did your inner critic say to you this week? Naming it out loud takes away its power.

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Will you stay a little longer? I’ve written more about this..