Aditi's Monologue

We’ve all read or heard the famous quote “I Think, Therefore I Am” by the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, right? Or at least the Billie Eilish lyrics, I’m hoping. I know, we’ve all seen it and know that at it’s heart, the phrase means that the very act of doubting or thinking proves that a thinking entity must exist to do that thinking. Even if a person is mistaken about what they perceive, or if their reality is completely simulated, they cannot logically doubt their own conscious experience at that exact moment.

I want to build on this a little further with something tiny yet powerful that I believed for a long, long time, and then recently, finding a post on Instagram made me want to write this. The IG post said Your first reaction is not you.

Simple and striking enough that I stopped my fanatic scrolling (I was on a mission to locate the latest “viral” post by a competition brand for one of the clients I manage), because this is something I have believed in for years, discussed it over the years with a handful of people who I knew would entertain the thought seriously, read about it by actively searching, and yet I have never written about.

Let’s remedy that today. And while I have diluted diversified myself by starting to write on Substack and Medium, I think a brooding, sort of self-reflective slash unsolicited-gyan-like piece on this subject belongs to my website/blog (/what are they calling it nowadays-?) because it feels safe.

We think. We react. We exist. But beyond that, here’s what I believe, and what I think most of us quietly know but rarely say out loud: we are not our first reaction or our first thought. We are our second one.

Or even a subsequent thought that chimes in after a beat or two, but feels most like the “you” you know yourself to be.

The first thought? That’s not you. That’s everyone who raised you, shamed you, taught you, hurt you, speaking in your voice. It’s the conditioning. It’s the accumulated weight of a thousand “don’t say that” and “people will judge you” and “this is how we do things.” It arrives fast, loud, and dressed up convincingly as instinct. But it isn’t instinct. It’s programming. I have thought of my first thoughts as the voice of unrestrained conditioning that I learned to be long before I learned who I was, before I knew better, before experience taught me, before I decided who I am going to be. And even though the next wave of thoughts keeps evolving as you grow and evolve and reposition yourself based on new information, the first thought remains to be not yours, but your conditioning’s.

The thought is mostly relieving, isn’t it? I have researched it again recently, of course, as part of my Neuroscience and Therapy course. In both Buddhist philosophy and Vedanta, the conditioned mind is shaped by past experiences and societal influences, limiting true freedom and self-awareness. Fancy words for something we’ve all felt, that strange moment when you snap at someone you love and then stand there wondering, who just said that?

That’s the gap. And that gap is where you actually live.

There’s a thought, widely attributed to Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, that has become almost a modern mantra: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” The whole philosophy of conscious living sits inside those three sentences. The first reaction is the stimulus doing its job. The second thought is you doing yours.

Sit with that for a while.

Think about how often this plays out. Someone says something that stings. Your first thought is defensive, spiky, maybe cruel, things you’d never actually choose to say if given a second. And then, a breath later, something else surfaces. Softer. Wiser. More you. That’s not a weakness. Researchers studying the “true self” consistently find that people across cultures believe their real inner self to be more moral, more thoughtful, more considered than their surface reactions suggest. We instinctively know the first flash isn’t the full story.

The problem is, most people never let the second thought speak. They’re too busy defending the first reaction.

We’ve built entire identities on our fastest, least-examined responses and called it personality. Called it “just how I am.” But what if who you are is actually the voice that comes after the noise, the one that says wait, the one that chooses, the one that surprises even you with its softness, or maturity, or a pause, and even grace?

So, all this is to say that I hope you don’t judge yourself for the first reaction or first thought that springs up. That’s probably not the current you at all, it’s probably your mother, your junior school teacher, your friend in 8th grade or even a book or story you read when you were 14. My point is, your first thought is not you. At least not entirely.

It’s the one that follows after your brain has had time to process the information. Your second thought doesn’t shout. It doesn’t have to. It just shows up in a quieter, clearer way that is unmistakably yours.

That’s the one worth listening to. That’s the one you can safely assume is “you”. For now, at least. What a beautiful thought, how freeing!