A monster is any creature, usually found in legends or horror fiction, that is often hideous and may produce fear or physical harm by either its appearance or its actions. The word "monster" derives from Latin monstrum, an aberrant occurrence, usually biological, that was taken as a sign that something was wrong within the natural order.
However, the root of 'monstrum' is 'monere' - which does not only mean to warn, but also to instruct, and forms the basis of the modern English 'demonstrate'. Thus, the monster is also a sign or instruction. This benign interpretation was proposed by Saint Augustine, who did not see the monster as inherently evil, but as part of the natural design of the world, a kind-of deliberate category error.
Hear the voices, see the words. Be apart from them. Your decision. Try and pack up all the little things of yourself. Take all the suitcases you dumped out everywhere and try and make it all fit back inside. Take some clumsy steps to force your orbit away, away.
cover your face, stamp your feet. know that feeling welling up inside you, the one that makes you feel like you’re going to cry or laugh and it boils inside you, threatening to bubble over.
you laugh when things are wrong, when they are frightening.
Scoop them out, discard them. It’s all faulty wiring and fat eaten up. Bet it squishes and oozes black.
Selfish, selfish, selfish.
Find something to live for that isn’t yourself, she said. I’m already clinging desperately to the raft of someone else. Trying to tread the waters of my own seas.
As a child, you dance. You spin around and you laugh. You sing. You take your sister’s hands and you dance in the way the only children can.
Somewhere along the way, you lose that.
It’s a waltz. Three positions. Alternating, always returning to baseline. Depression, mania, baseline.
As a child, you won an award for being an optimist. For having a positive attitude.
Right now, you hate yourself so much that you want it to end.
And you wonder where it all went wrong down the line. Where did the faulty wiring start that led you from that glass being so very full to being bone dry? When your mother asks you that question, asks you what happened to the happy child that she once knew, you can’t even remember who that was.
One two, one two.
When do you remember how to dance on your own, little monster? Or are you just echoing the steps of everyone before you?
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
I lost it at about 2:10 and bawled my way to the end.
“but I want to tell them
that all of this shit is just debris leftover when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be and if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself get a better mirror look a little closer stare a little longer because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit you built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself you signed it “they were wrong”’
You’re falling asleep, you close your eyes, and it’s like all the static comes rushing back. Sometimes it’s pictures, other times, it’s just noise. Background noise, in your brain, and you can’t fall asleep just yet because the incomprehensible sounds sometimes string together into coherent words, ones that don’t always make sense. It’s a constant buzzing, like watching a TV station turned between channels.
LET ME OUT the voice said, deeply, and you can almost hear it outside of your head. Your eyes open and then you slam them shut and try to sleep with a brain that’s a beehive.
In your world, my feet are out of step. My arms won’t move, my hands won’t grab. I will never read your stupid map. So don’t call me incomplete. You’re the freak.
Nothing I ever asked for. What if I’m not ill, at all? What if my brain is just creating symptoms, against my will, and I’m actually perfectly fine? I’m not mentally ill, I just have a condition that mimics mental illness.
