I was standing in the cereal aisle last Tuesday, holding a box of granola in one hand and my phone in the other, when I heard myself say - out loud, to absolutely no one - “Okay, we got the oats. Now we need the almond milk and then we’re done on this side.”

A woman with a cart paused and glanced at me. I smiled like I was on a call. I wasn’t on a call.

I do this constantly. I narrate my way through cooking. I announce my next move to the dog, who does not care. I talk myself through parking as if I’m coaching a student driver. And for most of my life, I assumed this meant something was slightly off about me - that I was scattered, or eccentric, or maybe just a little too comfortable being alone.

It turns out I was wrong about what it meant. And when I finally understood what the narration was actually doing - and where it came from - it changed the way I understood my entire childhood.

The voice that walks you through it

There’s a specific kind of self-talk that psychologists distinguish from the inner monologue most people have. It’s not thinking out loud about a problem. It’s not muttering in frustration. It’s narration - a step-by-step, task-oriented commentary on what you’re doing, as if you’re explaining the process to someone who needs to follow along.

“First we’ll chop the onions. Then we’ll get the pan hot. Okay, now we need the olive oil.”

It’s structured. It’s gentle. And it almost always uses “we.”

That “we” is the part that stopped me in my tracks when I first started reading about it. Because who is the “we” when you’re standing alone in your kitchen at 7 a.m. on a Sunday?

Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky had a term for this kind of speech. He called it private speech - the externalized self-guidance that children use to regulate their own behavior. But here’s what matters: Vygotsky observed that private speech doesn’t originate inside the child. It originates in the caregiver.

A parent narrates the world for their child. “First we put on our shoes, then we grab our backpack, and then we’re ready to go.” The child absorbs that scaffolding. Over time, the external narration becomes internal. The child no longer needs the guide because the guide has been internalized.

Unless it was never there in the first place.

What happens when nobody narrates for you

In homes where caregivers are emotionally unavailable - distracted by their own pain, overwhelmed, absent, inconsistent - the narration doesn’t happen. No one walks the child through the world step by step. No one says “first this, then that.” The child encounters the day as a series of unpredictable events without a verbal map.

A 2019 study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry found that children with inconsistent caregiver responsiveness showed significantly higher rates of externalized self-talk well into adolescence. The researchers noted that this speech served a regulatory function - it wasn’t a deficit but a compensation. These children were providing for themselves what the environment had failed to provide.

They were building their own narrator.

And that narrator doesn’t retire when you turn eighteen. She follows you into the grocery store, the kitchen, the parking lot. She is still doing the job she invented for herself at five years old - making the world feel predictable, structured, and safe.

The shame of being caught

Here’s the part that aches. Most people who narrate their way through daily tasks feel embarrassed about it. They think it means they’re losing it. They laugh it off when someone catches them. They pretend they were on the phone.

But the embarrassment is misplaced. It’s a form of self-consciousness about something that’s actually evidence of profound emotional resourcefulness.

Think about what it takes for a child to recognize - without being told, without any language for it - that their internal world is chaotic because no one is organizing it for them. And then to begin organizing it themselves. Out loud. In real time. With a gentleness that they are modeling from nowhere, because no one modeled it for them.

That’s not absent-mindedness. That’s self-parenting.

Dr. Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and author of research on self-talk and emotional regulation, found that people who use second-person or first-person plural pronouns when talking to themselves - “you’ve got this” or “okay, we need to…” - show measurably better emotional regulation under stress. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology confirmed that this distanced self-talk reduces anxiety and improves task performance.

The “we” isn’t a quirk. It’s a psychological technology. And the people who use it most naturally are often the people who had to invent it earliest.

The “we” is the child and the adult she became

I want to stay with that pronoun for a moment, because it reveals something that most people never think about.

When you say “okay, now we need to grab the garlic,” and you’re standing alone in your kitchen - who is “we”?

It’s not a slip. It’s not a grammatical habit. It’s a relationship.

The “we” is the child who needed someone to walk alongside her and the adult who stepped into that role. It’s the five-year-old who woke up in a house that didn’t explain itself and the thirty-seven-year-old who still talks herself through the morning because that’s how she makes the world feel navigable.

They are still walking through the world together. The narration is the evidence.

And the reason it feels comforting - the reason you don’t want to stop doing it, even when you feel silly - is because it works. It always worked. It was the first reliable thing you ever built for yourself, and on some level, your nervous system knows that.

This is what resilience actually looks like

We talk about resilience as if it’s a personality trait. As if some people are just tougher, more flexible, more equipped to handle whatever life throws at them.

But resilience isn’t a trait. It’s a history of creative problem-solving under conditions that shouldn’t have required it.

The child who narrates herself through the morning routine because no one else will - she’s not developing a habit. She’s developing a survival strategy. She is constructing scaffolding out of thin air and using it to climb.

A 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology examined adults who reported high levels of private speech during everyday tasks. The researchers found a significant correlation between externalized self-talk and what they called “self-regulatory competence” - the ability to manage emotions, stay organized, and maintain focus without external support. But the study also found something the researchers didn’t expect: participants with the highest levels of private speech also reported the lowest levels of childhood emotional support.

The narration wasn’t a symptom of dysfunction. It was evidence that the person had found a way to function - beautifully, reliably, on their own - in the absence of what should have been there.

You are not scattered - you are accompanied

If you are the person who talks to yourself in the grocery store, I want you to hear something that you probably never heard as a child.

You did something remarkable. You built a guide when you were given none. You created a voice that was steady when the voices around you were not. You learned to walk yourself through the world with patience and structure that no one taught you, because no one thought to teach you, because no one was paying close enough attention to notice you needed it.

The narration is not a flaw. It is the sound of someone who figured out, very early, how to make the world feel less overwhelming. And rather than being ashamed of it, you might consider that it’s one of the most quietly extraordinary things about you.

The next time you catch yourself saying “okay, now we need the…” to an empty room, don’t laugh it off. Don’t pretend you were on the phone.

Listen to the voice.

That’s you at five, and you at fifty, still walking through the day together. Still making sense of a world that never quite explained itself. Still doing the gentle, invisible work of being your own guide.

You were never absent-minded. You were never eccentric. You were just a child who needed someone to narrate the world into something safe - and when no one did, you became that someone yourself.

That’s not a quirk worth hiding. That’s a kind of love worth honoring.