You Can’t Just Make It Up
Why experience hits different, and what that means for the voices inside us.
“What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” — Plutarch
Your hands are sweating, and you haven’t even moved yet.
You’re about to say something you might regret.
Or hit send. Or walk into a room where something might change.
So you pause.
Breathe.
And call up the version of you that knows what to do, the wiser version of you. But the voice feels… distant.
Like someone reading lines they didn’t write.
You can’t just make it up.
Not if you’ve never been here before.
Not if you’ve never lived through it.
You can imagine anything.
But imagination isn’t memory.
It isn’t muscle. It isn’t consequence, or sweat, or the sound of your own voice cracking under pressure.
You can try to picture courage,
but it won’t hit the same if you’ve never felt afraid.
This essay isn’t an attack on visualization.
It’s not a declaration that only what’s painful is valid.
It’s a gentle line drawn in the sand between two ways of knowing:
One that’s been lived.
And one that’s been designed.
And when we talk about our inner world, our cast of inner voices, archetypes, parts, protectors, the difference matters.
A lot.
Because some voices live in you like echoes.
Others are just voices you’ve tried to learn to do impressions of.
Knowing which is which is the first step toward listening with purpose.
Last week, we asked: Who’s speaking?
This time, we ask something different:
Where did that voice come from, and has it ever really lived anything?
→ Missed Part 1? Who’s speaking? [Start here.]
It’s about recognizing the many voices within us and learning to distinguish them.
The Tension: Imagined Wisdom vs. Embodied Knowing
Our culture encourages simulation.
“Act as if.”
“Fake it till you make it.”
“Visualize the best version of yourself and show up as them.”
There’s a beauty in that, the idea that you can draft a better self into being.
But it also creates a strange distortion:
We confuse imagination for integration.
We confuse conjuring an inner voice with actually having lived enough to recognize its tone.
You can visualize an inner mentor giving you sage advice on a mountain top.
But if you’ve never actually been mentored,
if no one has ever sat with you in your mess and believed in you anyway.
Then you might be performing what you think wisdom sounds like.
You can call upon an “inner warrior” in a tough moment.
But if you’ve never stood your ground when it cost you something, you might be borrowing the costume, not the courage.
And that doesn’t mean you’re a fraud.
It means that experience matters.
Because authentic voices (the ones that run deep) aren’t just characters.
Their impressions are left by life itself.
They have roots, not just roles.
Embodied Experience: The Weight of What You've Lived
Think of a time you truly went through something.
Not something you read about. Not something you visualized.
But something that left a mark on your breath, your posture, your timing, your trust.
Maybe it was the first time you rode a bike without training wheels. The wobble. The sudden realization that no one was holding you anymore.
That you were doing it. Until you weren’t, and the pavement taught you the last half of the lesson.
Or maybe it was the moment after a car accident, when the world slowed down and sound disappeared, only to come rushing back with the adrenaline and the smell of burnt rubber.
Or the time you ran a marathon, or gave birth, or held someone’s hand as they died.
Moments that your body remembers even if your words forget.
Moments that changed something in how you carry yourself, not just how you describe yourself.
That’s embodied experience.
It doesn’t just live in your memory.
It lives in your nervous system.
It shows up in how quickly (or slowly) you speak when someone challenges you.
In how your jaw tenses before you even realize you’re angry.
In how easily you extend grace (or retract it) when someone stumbles.
You can’t fake that.
Experience is a feedback loop.
It surprises you. It forces a reaction. It confronts your expectations with reality.
It provides you with data you didn’t choose and forces you to respond to it anyway.
And after that… something in you shifts.
You might not have the words for it.
But the inner voice that emerges from that place, that voice speaks with a gravity that can’t be downloaded or visualized or pasted together from a podcast.
It’s not clever.
It’s genuine.
In Defense of Imagination
Imagination is powerful.
It’s how we rehearse what hasn’t happened yet.
It’s how we shape identity, prepare for risk, and dream beyond our current state.
It’s the inner sketchpad, the place we try on new voices, new futures, new ways of being.
You can imagine yourself standing up to your boss.
You can picture yourself speaking with clarity, with kindness, with conviction.
And sometimes, just that picture is enough to get you through the door.
That’s no small thing.
But imagination has its limits.
It’s clean.
Controlled.
Yours to edit.
Experience doesn’t offer a backspace key.
Experience throws things at you that you didn’t script.
It exposes the gap between how you think you’ll respond and how you actually do.
That’s why imagining an inner mentor is not the same as remembering one.
It’s why visualizing yourself as brave is different than recalling the exact moment you picked up the phone, said the hard thing, and your hand was shaking the whole time.
One is rehearsal.
The other is residue.
And that difference between imagining a voice and being shaped by it is the line between simulation and integration.
So What Do We Do With This?
If imagination is rehearsal and experience is integration, then the path to clarity isn’t to choose one and discard the other.
It’s to know which is which.
And to treat them accordingly.
When you tap into an inner voice, whether it’s a mentor, a warrior, a nurturer, or something darker, ask yourself:
Have I met this voice before?
Have I lived with it?
Or am I designing it from scratch?
If it’s rooted in experience, draw from that. Let it speak with the fullness of what you’ve lived.
And if it’s new, that’s ok too. Just don’t pretend it’s something it’s not.
Let it grow slowly. Test it in the small moments. Talk to it when the stakes are low. See who shows up when they’re high. Watch how it holds up when things get heavy, when you’re scared, tired, stretched.
Because that’s how imagined voices become embodied ones.
Not by pretending we already have them.
But by giving them chances to earn their place.
You don’t become wise by sounding like someone who is.
You become wise by living, noticing, and remembering what it felt like.
So, build your inner council.
Invite them in.
Just don’t skip the part where they have to live a little.
Questions to End On
You don’t need to have all the voices figured out.
You don’t need to “design” your inner warrior, your inner sage, or your inner nurturer, as if they were characters in a novel.
You just need to start paying attention.
Here’s a quiet question to take with you:
Which of your inner voices has earned your trust, and how do you know?
And a second one:
What’s one voice you’ve been trying to imagine into existence… that might need a little more living first?
No pressure.
Just notice.
That’s where the work starts.
And that’s the difference between pretending and becoming.
Book Recommendation:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.
It’s a dense, brilliant reminder that experience isn’t just a memory, it’s a blueprint imprinted into the nervous system. If you’re trying to listen to your inner voices more clearly, start by listening to the one that doesn’t use words: your body.