I used to be very suspect of friendships.
My first recollection on how this came to be dates back to 1962. I was 5 years old living on Pulaski Street in Newark. I had a friend who lived around the corner. I can’t remember her name. We traded toys. Her mother found out and came to my house to reclaim her toy. My friend lied and said I’d taken it. My parents punished me for stealing (and she kept my toy). It would be a very long time before I dared to entertain friendship again.
This personal anecdote shows how an early experience can give rise to conditioned behavior. From my childhood through early adulthood I was quite the loner. It changed eventually but only because I was willing to revise my opinions. This is only one nugget. Once you risk diving into the inquiry you’ll discover there are many more.
When you say “I believe this” or “I want that,” whose voice is actually speaking? Not literally. I mean the conviction itself, the certainty underneath the sentence.
Some of what you call your own voice really is yours, arrived at slowly, tested against your own experience. Some of it is a recording. Something you heard early and often. It might have been a parent, a teacher, or a friend. At some point, without even realizing it, it stopped sounding like information and started sounding like you.
This isn’t a new problem. What’s new is the scale of it. The amount of input competing to become your next conviction has never been higher. A lot of it is downright engineered to feel like your thought, your belief. It’s intentional. That makes this less a once-in-a-while thing and more an ongoing one. It means discernment is key.
Voice: Volume vs Source
Your voice, in this sense, isn’t your literal speaking voice. It isn’t your personality. It’s the source of a conviction. Every belief you hold arrived from somewhere: your own direct experience, or someone else’s. Every conviction was borrowed before you were old enough (or aware enough) to know the difference.
Both kinds of belief seem the same coming out of your lips. That’s the whole problem. A conviction you’ve actually tested feels certain. A conviction you inherited seems unquestionable because it’s never had to survive contact with a counterexample.
Certainty was never proof of origin. It only tells you the volume, not the source.
This isn’t about becoming contrarian, or manufacturing doubt for its own sake. Having a lot of opinions was never the same as having examined any of them. Let’s make it easy. The question isn’t how many convictions you can hold. It’s how many you can trace to their source.
The Four Hurdles
The first hurdle is fluency. An installed belief doesn’t announce itself as installed. By the time you’re old enough to examine it, you’ve been saying it so long it feels like truth. It doesn’t feel like something you were taught. It feels like something you know.
“El amigo es un peso en el bolsillo.” (Translation: a friend is a dollar in your pocket.) I heard this repeatedly as a child. Friendship was not encouraged in my home. A basic distrust of friends and a belief that they were self-interested was deeply embedded. It’s no surprise I had no friends as a child. It took me a bit, but I figured this one out. Today, I have friends all over the world.
The second hurdle is that intensity gets mistaken for authenticity. The convictions you feel most strongly about are often the ones you’ve examined least. Intense emotion has a way of shutting down the very faculties you’d need to examine it clearly. Strong feeling discourages the kind of slow, patient looking that examination requires. Doubt feels like weakness. It’s usually the opposite. Doubt is what a conviction sounds like right before it actually becomes yours.
The third hurdle is that it feels like it’s your own idea. Social media, podcasts, music, movies, and plenty of the culture are engineered to slide right in. It doesn’t feel like a pitch. You think it’s your own. The most effective kind of influence doesn’t feel like influence at all. It feels like clarity.
The fourth hurdle is cost. Questioning an inherited conviction can mean questioning the people who gave it to you, and the belonging that came with sharing it. That’s not a small thing to risk for the sake of an abstract idea like discernment. We all need to belong. It can be difficult and disruptive to choose yourself.
What Actually Helps
None of this means throwing out everything you were ever taught. Some of what was handed to you is genuinely worth keeping. The goal was never rejection for its own sake. It’s ownership: choosing consciously what you’d have chosen anyway, and being honest about the rest.
The belief about friends that I shared earlier has been totally blown out of the water. Not only have I made great friends, but I expanded my definition of it. It didn’t have to be someone I knew for 20 or 30 years. It could be a friend I made in the virtual world, it could be my customers and clients, it could be my writing circle. We may not see each other all the time, but when we do, it’s as if time has never passed. The connection is real and rich. It is true kinship.
You have the power to define and re-define your beliefs at will. You can reclaim your voice. Here are three writing practices that can guide you there:
Writing Practice 1: How Did We Meet? When a conviction feels absolute, ask where you first met it. Not whether it’s true yet, just where it came from. A belief that can name its own origin is very different from one that can’t.
Writing Practice 2: Have We Ever Fought? Notice the beliefs that have never been inconvenient. The ones that have never cost you anything, never asked you to disagree with anyone you love. Those are worth a deeper look. Not because they’re wrong. Because they’ve never actually been tested.
Writing Practice 3: What’s Our Story? Write down the history of your belief. Track back as far as possible and notice how it’s been shaped along the way. Try writing it as a timeline, a list, or in clusters. Write down as much of it as you can recall. The page doesn’t let you slip into silence. It waits until you’ve captured all the necessary bits.
Socrates put it plainly: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He didn’t mean the answers all had to change. He meant you actually had to go look. And keep looking.
Which of your convictions have you never once questioned, and what would it cost you to find out where it really came from?
