Am I happy? And I the person I want to be? Is this the life I want to live? Occasionally my answer to these questions is yes, but most of the time, it’s no. And my answer's no because I'm always fighting myself and losing. If I'm concerned about my weight, I know my first step should be to cut back on junk food. I know this and I want to do this, but 30 minutes later, there I am in the kitchen with a bag of chips in one hand and cookies in the other. My concern about my weight hasn't changed and I still believe junk food is making my situation worse, but still, I walk over to the couch and start scarfing it all down.

Things like self-control seem simple for others, but for me, it's really confusing. And this has always been the major obstacle stopping me from living the life I wish I had. How can I improve my self-control when from my perspective, self-control seems like voodoo witchcraft? When I ask myself questions like, "Why am I sabotaging myself? I get all tangled up in mental knots and nothing useful ever comes from it. This is my attempt to articulate my own understanding of myself so that I can try to make sense of these sorts of questions. And by forcing myself to flush out this ideas I hope that I can find practical ways to make my life better. I'm Daniel Lam, and this is Inner Monkey.

It's surprising to discover how often I’m my own worst enemy. Even for something as simple as trying to read more. I mean I could read while taking the bus to work, but I don’t. Instead, I chose to listen to music or a podcast. Sometimes after a long day, I could curl up with a good book, but I don’t. It’s just easier to turn on the TV and find something to watch.

I'll ask myself questions like: Why didn’t I do what I wanted? And "How do I trick myself into doing what I want?" These questions aren’t very profound and are probably very common but I’ve always struggled to find good answers to them because, these questions don’t make sense to me.

If, I’m a person with a single consciousness, and I assume that I am. The idea that I can trick myself, is impossible. Yet, sometimes it definitely feel like there’s an inner struggle inside of me, so what’s going on?

I think it all boils down to, how I understand myself I don’t mean my character or what my values are, But what I’m referring to when I use the word “myself”. Is it just my conscious thoughts? Does it include my emotions? My subconscious? What about my physical body?

Identity is a complicated and confusing subject because thinking about it too much often leads to paradoxes, like me arguing with myself. When I try to sort any of this out, I’m quickly overwhelmed by contradictions; things stop making sense real fast.

And in all this confusion, I just want to give up. But if I don't reflect on who I am, How can I mold myself into the person I want to be? I can’t. So in order to help me understand myself, in spite of this confusion, I use this idea of my inner monkey.

My inner monkey is basically all the parts of me that I have little or no control over. For example, I can't will myself to be happy or to find something funny. Emotions influence me in ways that I just can’t always control. But even as I try to talk about them now, I can hear myself referring to my emotions in the 3rd person, as if I’m talking about someone else.

It’s very natural for me to think of my emotions as a separate entity because I can’t control them. When I’m overwhelmed by emotions, sometimes I don’t even recognize myself, it’s as if I’m just along for the ride and someone else is in the driver seat. So instead of thinking of my emotions as both me and not me, which is confusing, I find it helpful to think of my inner monkey as the embodiment of the other me. The emotional me, the me who has cravings and impulses.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s really a monkey-like consciousness inside me. But I found it to be a useful tool for understanding just enough about myself to start making positive changes. And in the end, that’s all I’m really after.

I’m looking for ways to make my life better so I can live the life I want to live, and by separating the idea of my inner monkey from myself I was finally able to turn those unhelpful questions from before like, "Why am I sabotaging myself?" into questions that I can do something with like "Why is my inner monkey sabotaging me and what can I do about it?"

And this question...These kinds of questions, I can find the answers to.