The Governor

For years, I thought the voice regulating me was me. It took learning to see the gap between what happened and what followed to realise I had been living inside an adaptation - one intelligent enough to become almost indistinguishable from myself.

The governor was never idle. It scheduled. It refereed. It translated me into whatever the room required. It quality-checked every sentence before I said it, and priced the risk of every one I didn't. There was always another negotiation to conduct.

I didn't call it a governor then. I called it discipline. Drive. Being responsible. Who I am.

Don't get ahead of yourself.

It was intelligent. I want to be fair about that, because it was built honestly. An adaptive response to the conditions that I had existed within. Developed to keep me safe. In the box, in the performance, masked when the mask was safer, impressive when impressive was safer still, and quiet when it wasn't safe to sparkle. All of it turned down: the beauty, the fun, the sparkle, the speed, the intelligence. Not gone. Governed. It had learned, early and exactly, what survival required, and it delivered every day without rest.

But suppression is not neutral. It is not the absence of action. It is an action - constant, effortful and expensive.

A governor — the mechanical kind, on an engine — doesn't produce power. It regulates it. When little regulation is required, it barely has to intervene. When conditions keep pulling the engine away from where it needs to run, the governor is constantly correcting and compensating. Mine never stopped.

Is it worth the fight?

That was its work on the outside — deciding what the world got. Its work on the inside was deathly quiet. Pride arrived and was apologised for. Joy arrived and was audited. Beauty arrived and was timed. Every good moment was converted into an evaluation before it had finished being a moment. Every achievement filed, on arrival, as not enough.

There was no other channel to compare it against, no version of joy that arrived without being audited first, so I didn't know it was an audit. I thought it was just what joy felt like.

What have you forgotten?

It governed more than sentences. It governed geography. It governed speed too - not just where I could go, but how far ahead I could let myself see, because seeing further than the room could follow was its own kind of exile.

The anxiety was not a mood — it was a force that riveted me in place. And the governor worked with it, every day. It knew where I could go and where I couldn't. I could go where I had been. I could not go where I hadn't. The bank two minutes away was a branch I had never entered, so I drove across town to the branch I knew. Same branded bank, same errand. One was inside the territory. One was not.

And it worked. The governor was not being dramatic. It was keeping me safe — actually keeping me safe — from a world that really was, in that season, more than a person carrying that much could meet. The errand got done. The day got survived.

The map was not arbitrary. Some of its borders were drawn around places where the worst things had already happened. I'm not going to give you the coordinates. Not today.

The phone was governed harder still. I could not ring the takeaway to order fish and chips. I still can't tell you why.

How will you know what to say?

An unknown number went unanswered. A known number was worse.

You know exactly what that call is about.

Someone I had let down. Another entry in the ledger the governor kept, where every unmet obligation was filed as a failing of moral integrity. It never occurred to me that a woman carrying that much, that invisibly, was not failing morally. She was over capacity. But the governor didn't do load. It did verdicts.

The governor had an explanation for the pressure. For the tiredness, the flatness where the feeling should have been. The explanation was never that something large was being held down. It was that something was wrong with me.

2008. Eighteen. A blue bucket chair in the campus clinic, my fourth visit in as many weeks. The GP walks back in and hands me a brochure. I think you have depression. Here is a script. Five dollars to the receptionist and I'm out, eyes down, because I'd prefer not to pretend to be sparkly. In my room I rip open the brown paper bag. Small peach ovals. Ci-tal-o-pram. And finally, an answer to how are you other than fine. Depressed. I'm depressed.

See — even the doctor says so.

The diagnoses came and went after that. Depression. Anxiety. ADHD. Fibromyalgia. Months of numbness down one side of my body. I don't say this to dismiss them. I understand them differently now. As costs of containment — my body finding ways to hold what my mind had learned wasn't safe to express. Not broken. Intelligent. Doing exactly what it was designed to do, in conditions that were never designed to hold it.

The governor would have had me believe I was crazy before it let me see I was brilliant. A woman who believes she is unwell keeps her governor employed. A woman who knows what she is carrying starts asking why it was ever hired.

The strangest part - the more I understood myself, the stronger it got. Every framework I brought home, it learned first. Attachment. Trauma. Parts work. Boundaries. It became multilingual. I'm dysregulated. I'm overfunctioning. This is my protector speaking. I could name what I was doing wrong in three languages and still not stop doing it.

And it loved the talking. Talk therapy, counselling, the debrief on the debrief — talking about the talking. Of course it loved it. Talk was its home medium. It had been narrating me my whole life, and here were rooms where the narration was the work. The governor loved the sound of its own voice.

Self-awareness didn't quiet the governor. It gave it better vocabulary. Every framework named what had happened. None of them showed me I wasn't it.

Because the governor was never trying to understand. It was trying to keep me safe. Every insight I brought home became another instrument on its panel.

The first thing I ever saw was not the governor. It was the gap it left behind - the space where a defensive mechanism had already done its work, before I'd felt anything seperate at all. Something would happen — small, ordinary and a defensive mechanism would appear. Not one. Whichever one the moment required - rationalising it, minimising it, explaning it away before anyone could ask. Each one was protecting a different untruth. The governor wasn't any one of them. It was what decided, underneath all fo them, what was allowed to be seen at all.

Defence was a tool of the governor. I began to notice that what followed was not the same thing as what had happened. The thought, the feeling, the behaviour arriving in the event's wake: separate from the event, separate from each other, often not even related to it. A cascade wearing the event's name.

A programme taught me to draw triangles - trigger, thought, behaviour, feeling, taken apart and pinned to a page. Page after page of them, moments I had been inside, laid out flat and examined.

And there, in my own handwriting, were sentences I had believed my whole life. Sitting outside my head now. Looking like something somebody had said. You can talk around a sentence for years. When you step into it you can feel it for what it is. When you write it down, you have to look it in the eye.

A sentence you can read is a sentence you can test. A voice you can hear is a voice you can question.

I didn't understand that straight away. I couldn't change anything in that moment. Learning how came next. The governor would take much longer. But the programme had a phrase for what had just happened - a line about levelling up.

The imagery was truer than I knew.

All my life I had been the one chased through the maze. Along the corridors I knew, away from the borders I never drew. Now there was daylight between the event and the verdict.

And I had learned the one thing the game never tells you at the start.

The ghosts can be eaten.