How to Interview Yourself and Get the Truth

A few weeks ago, a friend made an offhand joke that lodged itself in my brain.

“You should just interview yourself on your show sometime.”

We laughed. It felt absurd. My radio show, North of Normal, is built on unscripted conversation with other people—leaders, business owners, neighbors—each of them bringing their own stories into the room. I’ve always believed the magic lives in the space between two humans, in the not-knowing of where a conversation might go.

Interviewing myself felt like cheating. Or worse, like performance.

But the idea wouldn’t leave me alone.

This week, when my scheduled guest had to cancel, I realized I had a choice. I could scramble to fill the slot, rerun an old episode, or I could do the thing that quietly terrified me: sit in the guest chair myself, live on air, with no script, no edits, and no escape.

So I invited my cat, William Wallace, to interview me instead.

On the surface, it was funny. William is the unofficial mayor of Littleton. He’s deeply judgmental in the most loving way. He insisted on writing his questions down ahead of time because, frankly, he’s a little shy. The premise gave people something to smile about.

But underneath the humor was something far more serious.

William is the part of me that already knows.

He’s lived beside me for seven years. He’s watched me unravel and rebuild without needing explanations. He’s seen me before I had language for what I was healing from. He knows the truth I sometimes try to soften for other people.

And once we went live, I realized something immediately: interviewing yourself is far harder than interviewing anyone else.

When you interview another person, you’re listening for them. You’re tracking their story, holding space, asking the next question with curiosity and care. But when you interview yourself, there is nowhere to hide. You can’t redirect. You can’t smooth an answer in your head before letting it out. You can’t edit in real time.

You either tell the truth as it comes—or you don’t.

Most of William’s early questions were harmless. Funny, even. But then he asked me something that made my whole body react before my mind caught up.

“What’s in the black bag on the top shelf of the closet?”

The second I read the question out loud, I started sweating. My hands shook. My heart raced. I was sitting alone in a radio studio, but it felt like every listener could suddenly see straight through me.

That black bag contains a part of my story I’ve spent years learning how to hold without shame.

For a long time, I believed that some truths were simply too heavy to share.

Earlier this year, someone even told me I probably shouldn’t talk about certain experiences because they made people uncomfortable. I understood what they meant. There are details that don’t land gently. There are stories that don’t fit neatly into conversation.

And yet, sitting there live on air, I felt the familiar pull between fear and love.

Fear says, Protect yourself. Stay vague. Keep this tidy.

Love says, Tell the truth anyway.

I had no time to debate it. William was waiting. The microphone was live. And for the first time in my life, I let myself speak the truth before it was tidy.

As I answered, I could hear myself circling something deeper than the facts of the story. What I was really naming was a shift that has reshaped my entire life: the choice to move from fear into love, again and again, even when my nervous system protests.

For years, fear taught me how to survive. It taught me vigilance, preparedness, self-protection. Those skills kept me alive. But they also kept me closed. Guarded. Separate.

Love, on the other hand, asks something much riskier.

Love asks you to be seen.

As I spoke about the black bag, I wasn’t just explaining the handgun in my closet. I was naming the long arc of learning that safety isn’t the same as isolation, and that healing doesn’t come from pretending hard things didn’t happen. It comes from integrating them into who you are now—without letting them define you.

I almost didn’t say all of it. I felt the familiar urge to skim, to summarize, to soften.

But something stopped me.

This is the thing I’ve learned through years of quiet practice: when we hesitate before a truth, that’s usually the truth asking to be spoken.

For the last two years, I’ve been practicing this privately. I use a recording device for audio journaling. No audience. No edits. Just me, a question, and my own voice answering it in real time. Speaking truth out loud has been one of the most powerful tools in my healing—not because it makes things easier, but because it makes them clearer.

When you speak instead of just thinking, three things happen at once:

You feel it.

You say it.

You hear it.

There’s no hiding from that combination.

Interviewing myself live on air was like turning that private practice inside out. I couldn’t pause. I couldn’t delete a sentence and try again. I had to trust that the truth—spoken imperfectly—was enough.

And something surprising happened.

Instead of creating distance, the honesty created openness. Instead of isolating me, it invited connection. The very thing I had been warned was “too heavy” turned out to be the thing that made the room feel more human.

This is the paradox we rarely talk about: the truths we’re most afraid to say are often the ones that open the door to real community.

When we stay stuck in our heads, rehearsing and revising, we might sound polished—but we remain alone. When we speak before it’s tidy, we give other people permission to do the same. We remind each other that being human is not a performance.

William, of course, didn’t flinch. He never does. He already knew.

That’s what makes interviewing yourself such a radical practice. You’re not trying to impress the part of you that already knows the truth. You’re trying to catch up to it.

If you feel disconnected, stuck in your head, or overly concerned with how you’re perceived, I want to offer this gently: you may not need better answers. You may need better questions—and the courage to let yourself answer them out loud.

Try this:

Sit somewhere quiet.

Ask yourself one honest question.

Press record.

And answer without stopping.

Don’t worry about coherence. Don’t worry about how it sounds. Let the truth come out messy, unfinished, and real.

Speak it before it’s tidy.

You might be surprised by what you hear. And even more surprised by how much lighter it feels to finally let yourself say it.

-Amanda