The Invisible Inner Terrible Someone

The Invisible Inner Terrible Someone is Sugar’s name for a voice that converts ambiguity into frightening certainty: a pause becomes rejection, disagreement becomes condemnation, and a family history of illness becomes a prediction of personal doom. In her reply to a correspondent afraid of the future, Sugar does not claim that fear can simply be banished. Instead, she makes the voice recognizable, tests its claims against evidence, and argues that it should not be allowed to govern a life. Its opposite is not certainty about what will happen, but the capacity to be present without pretending uncertainty can be mastered.

A voice that turns uncertainty into judgment

Sugar introduces the figure as an invisible presence in the mind, one that says things with no basis in truth. She also acknowledges that she has her own version: when she feels internally tangled, she stops to ask where its information came from and demands proof. The image makes anxious thought sound both intimate and questionable. The voice belongs to the person hearing it, yet its assertions need not be treated as reliable knowledge.

The correspondent’s fears provide the reply’s central case. She is worried that she may develop cancer because relatives have had the disease, and she wants to explain to her lover what he might face if she were diagnosed. Sugar distinguishes the relatives’ actual illnesses from the correspondent’s nonexistent one. The leap from family history to an assumed early death, she argues, is not supported by what is known. Genetic history may be one predictor of a person’s likelihood of disease, but it does not establish that the disease will occur.

Putting the voice’s claims to the test

The reply extends this method beyond illness, showing how the same inner voice can turn ordinary social encounters into evidence of personal rejection. If friends are slow to greet someone who enters a room, the mind may claim they secretly dislike her; the available circumstance is that they were deep in conversation and took a moment to respond. Sugar sets the alarming interpretation beside a less dramatic explanation, asking whether there is credible evidence for the fear rather than treating fear itself as proof.

A remark about public school offers another example. An acquaintance says that, given large class sizes, she would never send her son to public school. The correspondent may hear this as an accusation that she is a second-rate mother, recklessly harming her children because their classes have thirty pupils. Sugar offers a different reading: the acquaintance may simply be sharing the complexity of her own parenting decisions. The detail of the thirty children makes the imagined indictment concrete, but it does not make that indictment true.

Professional criticism produces the same distortion. Readers may strongly disagree with advice Sugar has given in her column; the anxious voice turns that disagreement into the claim that she is an ignorant writer who should never write again. Sugar counters by noting that it is impossible for every reader to agree with every point. In each example, the discipline is similar: separate an event from the harsh verdict attached to it, then ask whether the verdict follows from the facts.

The cost of giving it power

Sugar describes her own sense of self through two imagined drawings. One is a portrait of a happy, self-confident, ordinary-looking woman; the other is a close-up of a huge, gaping mouth ravenous for love. The contrast captures the tension between a functioning outward self and a hunger for reassurance that can make perceived slights feel decisive. Her response is to remind herself that she is loved even if some people do not love her, and that she remains all right even when friends seem to slight her, another parent would make a different school choice, or something she wrote angers readers.

That reassurance is not presented as a once-and-for-all cure. Sugar says she has to cut the inner voice off at the quick rather often, and that her emotional well-being has depended on doing so over the years. If she let it take the upper hand, she says, her life would become smaller, stupider, squatter, and sadder. The correspondent, too, is granting the voice too much power: sorrow and fear have clouded her ability to reason about mortality. Continued submission to its predictions could rob her of the life she deserves. The metaphor therefore gives the voice both a recognizable form and a practical measure of its danger: not simply that it causes distress, but that it can constrict the life lived in response to distress.

Mortality and the present

Sugar does not advise the correspondent to conceal her fears from her lover. She can tell him about her family’s experience of cancer and share her grief and fear. What she should not do, Sugar argues, is ask him to prepare for an illness she does not have as though its arrival were already established. The distinction is between honest conversation about fear and presenting a feared possibility as a fact.

The reply widens the frame from cancer to mortality. A partner could also die in a car accident, of heart failure, or by drowning; these possibilities are no more a basis for predicting exactly what will happen than the correspondent’s family history is proof that she will develop cancer. Every human being, Sugar observes, is mortal, as are June bugs, black bears, and salmon. Everyone will die, but no one generally knows who will die tomorrow, next year, or in the next half century, or what the cause will be.

That lack of knowledge is not, in Sugar’s account, a curse to be escaped by rehearsing every loss in advance. It is part of the circle of life, encompassing the living, the dead, those being born, and those fading out. Trying to position oneself outside that circle cannot prevent grief, spare loved ones their grief, or lengthen or shorten a life. Sugar’s answer to the correspondent’s fearful forecast is instead immediate and modest: she is here, and she is all right for now. The concept’s significance lies in that return to the present—not in a promise of safety, but in refusing to let an imagined future take the place of the life that is actually being lived.