The Creature That is Me

“Ready for a story?” The creature licks its lips, before twisting them into a long, thin smile. I see the little girl stand before it in the black, wet room. Pretty butterfly clips sit in her damp hair, and there is blood running from her eyes. My head pounds.

The creature changes forms a lot. Today, it is slender and pale, with sinewy hands that drag across the floor. But the girl is always the same. She is always small, always crying, always sitting in the darkest corner of the darkest room. This is not her first encounter with the creature, the creature whose name I do not know.

I can only watch silently as the little girl cries, because she cannot see me. When the creature has finished spitting its venomous story, the girl simply crawls back to her dark corner and hugs her knees, repeating the creature’s story to herself in broken murmurs. Soon, the room will be filled with water again, and the little girl will be able to sleep. It always happens this way.

A retreating shape pauses in my field of vision. I look down, and from the heavy shadows below, see the creature flash its milky eyes at me before slipping away into nothingness.

This creature, whose name I do not know.

*

The world has fallen on dark days. Wildfires have ravaged the earth, volcanoes have coughed and spluttered, while locusts in their teeming hordes have bloated the stale, baneful air. And now, this. The streets are echoing like a dark well, and the human spirit is howling. Now more than ever, we need human connection. Now more than ever, we need kindness.

Ever since the lockdown began, I have felt myself splitting in two. One part of me is on fire, ablaze with the passion to create and be productive and succeed. Stories and ideas are laced through her bones, and her eyes swell with aspiration. But there is another part of me that is stronger, and it is a little girl who lives underwater.

This is the part of me that is always staring at my past, the part that is always anxious about the future. It is the part of me that is always budgeting, always nail-ripping, always overthinking. The part that bites, pulls back, and is fearful of trying. Her bones are cracked by resentment and guilt, and she always keeps one anxious eye on the death toll.

This is the part that always wins.

I kick away the twisted bedsheets, reposition myself. I know I should be productive, but I reach for my phone anyway. Recently, I have been struggling to reconcile these two parts of myself: the part that tells me what I should be doing, and the part that wants me to rest. It’s created a fissure inside of me and, in this time of radical stillness, I can feel the two sides tearing at each other’s throats.

Pure, fiery energy caged inside an indolent shell, that’s how I feel. Half on fire, half underwater - but always half. And social media doesn’t really help. It’s haunted by carefully crafted masks, with smiles hooked in with safety pins. They are all salivating, hungry to seize this misnomered ‘opportunity’ we are being told all about. “Don’t listen to them,” a small voice says. I see the little girl’s eyes open underwater. “Be still… Just, be still.” I curl in on my side, ignoring the burning shape looming at the foot of my bed.

But I still feel guilty. I feel guilty that I’m not writing my King Lear, that I’m not discovering my gravity. Hell, I’m not even doing yoga. In these moments, I often retreat into myself, and hours slip by like rain over glass. While the little girl floats in her quiet sleep, the fire inside of me scorches my skin, and I wonder if I am alone in feeling this fractured, if I am alone in feeling this tired.

And that’s when I see it. A woman with long, black hair, shrinking into her own hollowed-out torso. A deep fissure splits her in two, just like me, and I feel the apathy in her downcast gaze. My eyes linger over Myriam Tillson’s latest illustration and suddenly, a sense of human connection sweeps over my body. Laid bare on somebody else’s sketchbook page is the manifestation of my feelings, letting me know that even in times of mass alienation, we are all still connected.

When I first saw this image, something about it deeply resonated with me. The young girl withdrawing into herself: we are both slinking away into the same cavern, turning our backs to the same inky darkness. Inside Myriam's world of gouache, ink and pencil, vulnerabilities are embraced. Her fractured characters tell me that it's okay to cry and feel and rest; it's okay to give in to softness.

I read the caption: “Myself is the best hiding place.” And there it is. Connection. Though the subject may seem dark, its sincerity inspires a tender sense of joy: the joy of knowing that you are understood, that you are valid, that you are not alone in this. This piece by Myriam Tillson feels like a hand reaching through the darkness, just to let me know that it's there. It’s the green light on the East Egg dock, the olive leaf in the mouth of a dove. “Hey,” it says, with solemn reverence. “I feel it, too.”

Myself is the best hiding place. I repeat the words again, flip them around on my tongue, and hear the two parts of myself fighting to speak. “It’s safe inside here,” the little underwater girl says plaintively. “You’re nothing out there.” Her wet tendrils crawl up my arms like leeches and suddenly her cold, bloodless lips are at my ear. They whisper: “Stay with me.”

A hot flash, violent and red. A woman on fire walks towards me. “You could do so much more, be so much more.” Flames drip from her skin like water. “Why are you a coward?” I look between the two spectres, try to open my mouth to speak - but the fissure widens into a chasm and swallows me whole. I’m falling and falling and all I can hear are echoing voices, sodden with contempt. Worthless lazy failure boring stupid talentless ugly damaged. At the bottom of the chasm is a black room, with a black floor covered by black water. I fold in on myself, the voices whirring like bullets all around me. I screech and plead and beg and they rise and get louder and louder and then -

Silence.

From the water rises a primordial fear, caked in thick clots of mud. Slowly it crawls, and pants and grins, its palms and knees slipping frantically as it races maniacally towards me. And it always gets here. It’s done this before, you see, eating me alive. This is what guilt looks like. This demon is guilt.

Mouth hot, body ache, split skull: I need to escape my head. Turning to the window, I squint my eyes like commas to the sun, watching it wane in the doleful hours of dusk. Sometimes, I spend so long hiding inside myself that I forget what the world really looks like. And anyway, the mind is not a place where I can dwell for too long, because in that space behind the eyes is where demons are invented. The Demon of Guilt. The Demon of Blame, Shame, Bitterness and Envy. They all live inside the hiding place, their crosshairs locked and eager. I am their creator and prey.

Now that the world is experiencing a collective existential fear, it's important to learn how to handle our thoughts in a healthy way. So often we look for kindness from others to make ourselves feel better - but when we feel low or discouraged, we set our inner demons loose, and are the last people to show ourselves any kindness. My mind travels back to a video I watched that made me think… What if? What if we were able to step away from our demons, and see ourselves consciously? What if we were able to change the way we spoke, the way we thought about ourselves, and become a friend, rather than an enemy? What if, in the wise words of Adam Duff, we were able to have some compassion for ourselves?

I blink and it's three a.m. I'm sitting at my desk, willing my hand to move the brush that I'm holding, and just paint. The screen that faces me bears the image of three deterioriating figures, haunting and powerfully uncanny. The grovelling fingers, the erasure of sight, the insipid skin that cracks and melts... something about them confronts me as frighteningly familiar. I've seen creatures such as these before, have felt and smelt their fetid ache. One of them tilts its head inquisitively at me, as though it recognises my face, too. I drag my brush through the paint again, poise it above my blank canvas, and listen.

"Hey guys, it's Adam from Lucid Pixul and, welcome back." These ten words feel like returning home; warm, safe. Adam Duff: Candian digital artist, teacher, and all round inspiration. Listening to his incredibly heartening art talks has brought me joy and relief in times when I needed them most. Even now, as I paint along to his words, I feel the fissure within me begin to mend; and even though he gears these talks towards artists, I would urge everyone reading this to type in the words 'Lucid Pixul' whenever they feel they've been underwater too long.

“People are what you accuse them of being,” Adam Duff's words drift over the soft piano piece that dances in the background. “So far, I’ve painted this picture as somebody on the outside, doing this to somebody else - a force outside of yourself that is internalised, and changes and manipulates your path in life.” I focus on the words as I push the paint around, drag it, smear it, make it form something. “But what I wanna talk about today is that other person, that other individual, that other entity that is doing exactly that to you every single day of your life, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Any guesses?” I pause for a moment and look at the screen in front of me. “Of course, I’m talking about you.”

Like an arrow spinning through air, his words hit me with precision. “That other entity.” The little girl underwater snaps her eyes open, and together we see our demons incarnate - hear their endless of cycle of beratement that has held us captive for too many years. And it feels like Adam Duff has met these demons, too. He is painting them now, manifesting their image on his Cintiq graphics tablet. Throughout his talk, he makes me aware of how we are all constantly accusing, abusing and refusing ourselves, for no justifiable reason whatsoever - and the dangerous part about it is that eventually, Adam points out, we will start to believe the heinous lies we tell.

It made me realise that we are all innate storytellers, inventing a lifetime of narratives in which we are incompetent, unsuccessful and unworthy. With the world flipped upside down as it is, we need to be kinder to ourselves. We are standing at the precipice, our toes over the edge, looking into the eyes of a new way of being, one where we are more introspective, observant and still. In this place, we must mend the fissure and learn to have compassion for ourselves.

Suddenly, a call - “Hey!” I turn to see a digital artist from Montreal, wearing a baseball hat and holding a Cintiq. “There’s a cloud over your head!” I look back to the illustration of the girl hiding inside of herself, but she has disappeared. A dark cloud has formed above me, and I know the girl is inside it with the rest of my thoughts. “See them?” Adam urges. “Touch them with your hands. Move them around. Analyse them.” Between my fingers, the cloud feels soft. I squish it tight like a ball, stretch out like pasta - but a moment later, it turns to water, and slips through my fingers into nothing. “See?” I hear Adam's voice say through the screen. “When you look at it, it allows you to let it go.”

The video ends. The music stops. I lean back and look at my painting, pleased at having been able to create something at all. But somewhere, something is happening. Cutting through my momentary stillness comes the strangled eyes of the girl underwater. The water is draining again, emptying from the black room. The creature is coming. But what is this thing, this creature I don't understand? I try to untangle a rope of thoughts that snake through my head before remembering something imporant. "Any tiny little vulnerability," Adam Duff speaks. "Always comes from ignorance of self." I think about this for a minute, think about the storytelling creature that visits the little girl. Why is she so afraid of him? What does he say to her? And who is this little girl, the one who wears butterfly clips and lives in a black room?

Ignorance of self. I need to ask questions. I need to meet the little girl. And I need to hear this creature that lives inside of me, and name it. Only then will I be able to quench the woman on fire; only then will I be able to save the girl underwater. Whatever is carving out this fissure in my chest, whatever is scooping out the organs and replacing them with glass, is bound to the stories that creature tells.

I need to remove it, sink my teeth into its meat and rip it from my abdomen. But how do I even start? How do I metamorphose from within this fleshly cocoon, peel back the rotting layers, and emerge as something that radiates light? Well, that’s where Dr. Nicole LePera steps in.

Time is running out.

I urgently read through Dr. Nicole LePera's content, all the while feeling the burning lungs of the little girl underwater. The water is disappearing fast, and panic seizes her by the throat when she hears the distant sneer of her visitor. Some cure, some answer must be hidden in the Holistic Psychologist's archives. In the back of my mind, I hear the woman on fire laugh. "I told you this would happen."

I drink up Dr. LePera's words greedily, desperate to find the elusive thing I don't know I'm looking for. 'Ego Awareness. Ego Work. Ego Stages.' My eyes linger, devour. "The ego is the voice in your head that tells stories and assigns meaning around who you are." The stories. The creature's stories. "Our egos cause suffering when we are unconscious of the reality that we have an ego driving our behaviour." So that's what you are, formless creature, and that's why I cannot name you.

Frantically, I search the Holisitic Psychologist's bank of knowledge - I need to learn how to name this creature so that I can free the little girl. I need to be able to step outside of my mind and see my mass of intangible thoughts for what they really are: stories invented by this creature, this ego. But the ego is not just a creature; it's a demon. It is that smiling shadow in the corner that feeds on vulnerabilities and whispers into your ear, controlling you like a marionette.

I see it now, slinking through the halls of my memories as it makes its way towards the little girl. The water has almost emptied. There is no more time - and then suddenly, I see it. 'Inner Child Awareness.' Fragments of a picture slowly piece together in my mind, drawn closer by every letter I read:

...the unconscious part of the mind…

...whose experiences didn’t just go away...

...carries our unmet needs, suppressed emotions…

...the world through their lens...

The fragments are forming, melding, revealing. "The inner child," Dr. LePera writes - I watch as the last pieces glide into place - "is the child still within us." Butterfly clips. Plaits. A school pinafore. The image I am looking at is an image of myself, seven-years-old; and it is an image of the girl inside my head.

My inner child is the little girl who lives underwater.

This little girl has seen it all, experienced life beyond her years, and felt the same pain as I. Slowly and slowly, year by year, I have watched her small body crawl through the colours, the songs and the dances, and bury itself in the darkest recess of the darkest cave. I see her now, her bruised knees pulled up to her chin, and she looks scared. The water is gone. The creature is coming.

Rocking back and forth, her small mouth twitches almost imperceptibly - but I can hear her words. For me, they never stop. Bad person all your fault not enough no, no, no. The sneering of the creature gets closer and I feel her jaw clench with fear. As she rocks faster, arms wrapped around her legs, her knuckles turn white. Do better be better leave disappear start now, now, now, now. The creature is clamoring, angry and hammering. The little girl is rocking faster and faster. Skin splits over knuckles. Blood starts leaking from her fixed, stony eyes. You’re wrong your fault run away hide, hide, now, now.

And then, without moving a muscle, the little girl shrieks. Blood is running in rivulets down her knees, and she screams more. I clutch my head, try to break through to the black room, but an invisible wall keeps me back. My hands turn to fists and pound against the wall. The glass splinters, pinching the meat of my hand in its hairline fractures. Eventually, my arm bursts through - but as I reach my hand towards her, the im--age --

gl-itches --

things - sh-i--ft.

The glass ruptures and suddenly, she is inches from my face, shrieking that awful shriek. Her eyes are filled with blood, like two red moons embedded in porcelain. “Let me help you!” I plead and then, like a candle in a jar, the little girl falls silent. Shaking her head, slowly, slowly shaking her damp little head, she retreats from me in the darkness.

“No…” She whispers. “No, it’s too late for that…” The little girl draws her back up against a corner, her eyes darting around the room frenetically like a wild animal.

So she sees it first.

I feel her blood run cold, her limbs freeze as the creature emerges from the shadows, with fiery eyes and long, bedraggled hair. The little girl freezes as the creature approaches her, with the rest of its body cloaked in darkness. I don’t know what I was expecting to see this time around - maybe a tall, faceless shadow, bending obscurely like a paper doll. But when it finally reaches the little girl, and steps into the light, I was not expecting the creature with deep, panting breaths to be myself. I watch in horror as my lips curl back over my teeth and I say, silkily: “Ready for a story?”

The little girl cups her ears and scrunches her eyes and shakes her head like a ship in a storm. My phantom self grins from ear to ear, and I can hear it already begin to weave stories. I cup my own ears and shake my own head, desperately willing the creature away, the creature that is me. But then, I remember something.

The words come to me as a voice. “Pay attention,” Dr. LePera speaks. “Pay attention to the ego’s stories.” With a deep breath, I relinquish my ears, close my eyes, and become very still. This creature that looks like me is the demon, and I am listening to it, to myself - the Ego. “What is it saying?”

Come here, little girl, and let me explain

The reasons behind why you are to blame

For the state you are in, and your failure to win

At a life where so many others found praise.

Do you do enough work, like they do?

Do you have enough talent, like they do?

Have you put in the years, the blood, sweat and tears

To deserve a bigger piece of meat to chew?

Your fault is your own, you might as well quit

‘Cause you’re too wounded by the black dog that bit

So hide in your seams, forget all your dreams

You’re better off trying to make yourself sink.

Every word is like a dull thud against my skull. I see the little girl collapse onto her knees, her hands still clutching at her ears, but weaker this time. She starts to curl in on herself again when I think again of the Holistic Psychologist. “Name it!” I hear her say like music seeping into a nightmare. “Name your Ego, and face it without judgement.”

All of a sudden, it clicks. I am not my Ego. I flash my eyes to the little girl, who has gone back to rocking in her corner as the shape retreats from her, grinning. I am not my Ego. Somehow, she hears me, and turns her teary eyes towards where I stand. “I am not my Ego.” This time, I say it out loud. “I am NOT my Ego.” I say it again and slowly, the girl stands up. I notice that the demon has stopped, too, its wary eyes piercing through mine. And then it comes to me. “Nonsum!” I exclaim, and the little girl’s eyes clear. “Its name is Nonsum!”

Like walking in slow motion through a battlefield, I watch as my inner child locks her sights on the Ego, and deliberately walks towards it. Shoulders back. Chest high. Chin lifted. Spirit strong. Ripples of light grow from her tiny footsteps, filling the room with ethereal colour. At her approach, the demon begins to morph. The skin bubbles and boils and bursts, melting away from the bones that are breaking. I see its spine twist and rupture, contorting into a lowercase r. Its body becomes a mass of dark, putrid pulp, and it no longer grins from ear to ear.

When she reaches the Ego, who has frozen in place, she doesn’t condemn it, hate it or hold it to blame. Instead, she reaches out her small hand and says: “Nonsum.” The name floats in the air like music, and the Ego gently bows its head as the girl places her hand atop it.

At this precise moment, I feel a weight lift from my shoulders, before being blinded by a bright light. When I open my eyes, my inner child is holding hands with a tall, graceful shape, faceless, and robed in luminous white silk. What was once a black, wet room is now a vast ocean, and three entities stand hand-in-hand as the galloping seafoam breaks at their ankles: the little girl, Nonsum, and the woman on fire.

The fissure is closing. I can see it mending.

This is what it felt like when I learned to understand my ego - to hear its stories and be able to separate them from reality. And this is what it felt like to connect with my inner child, and free her from the waters of unresolved pain. Coming across Dr. Nicole LePera’s social profile was a watershed moment in my journey of getting to this place of happiness, because her teachings are what allowed me to make these changes in the first place. Her lessons echo Adam Duff’s mantra of having compassion for yourself, and now more than ever, I think everyone needs to learn how to achieve this.

During this quarantine, I am making it my mission to abandon my toxic thought cycles, to separate myself from the ego, and to heal my inner child who, sometimes, still cries in the dark. When we open ourselves up like this, and fill our heads with inspiring content, we will not only be able to connect with our own inner children, but will also see the wounded child inside everyone we meet. Why is this important? Because, as the Holistic Psychologist teaches, it will allow us to be more empathetic and less judgemental. It will teach us to see the vulnerability behind our own and other people’s actions. It will make us more compassionate. It will make us kinder, more forgiving. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what humanity needs most right now?