Abe's Permission

Hey, it's Sunday Morning.

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."

Lincoln said that. I was nineteen and it hit me like permission.

So I stayed quiet—in meetings, in classrooms, anywhere words mattered.

I stopped bringing sketches to class, only finished work. No explanations needed. The work was good, it often was, or it wasn't.

I got my first job, stayed silent, let the work do the talking, got accolades. It worked until it didn't.

After five years (or was it ten?)—I woke up with my tongue speaking in a foreign voice. My mind still stumbled often—trading i for e, pronouncing e instead of s—the first level of reprogramming was complete. But something had shifted.

It didn't feel like progress. It felt like betrayal. As if my tongue had arrived while the rest of me was still packing.

That's what change feels like sometimes—a secretly invited invasion. You practice new habits, new words, new ways of seeing, and they don't fit. They scrape against the memory of who you used to be. You try to speak, hoping your mouth will catch up to your mind.

For years, I thought fluency was about pronunciation—rolling the r, softening the th, shaping my mouth the right way. But what I really wanted was to sound like myself again. Not the self I had been, but the one I hadn't yet met.

Inner work often starts there too. A foreign voice in a familiar body. You say things you don't quite believe yet: "I can slow down." "I can be enough." "I can live without fear." At first they sound false, like a bad translation. But repetition does the quiet work. The vowels stretch. The consonants fall into place. One day, without notice, the new language becomes natural.

Because reprogramming isn't the loss of who you were; it's learning to speak the truth of who you've always been.

And one day, without notice, you hear yourself. Finally.