I’m a survivor.

I might not look like I survived any massive ordeal, and no, it wasn’t cancer. Yet, it caused me to not function at all for a few weeks, and function only barely and get through only vital duties for a lot longer. Had I been hit by a lorry, the pain wouldn’t have been greater, yet there was nothing for anyone to see.

I know the danger is still there, but I’m learning to manage it better.

What happened was, I came face to face with my demon.

Maybe you’ve faced your demons already. Maybe you don’t even know about your demons.

I’m grateful mine eventually showed its face, because I finally knew about it and had a chance to deal with it. It had controlled my life, made it much sadder and smaller than it could be, and I had no idea.

All my life I had felt inadequate, lonely, and tried hard at everything I did, in the hope one day I’d feel I was good enough. Good enough to feel loved.

Until I collapsed from exhaustion and couldn’t function any more.

Then came the hard work of confronting the dark side inside me that had been holding me back. The programming that had made me always try harder, and yet never made me feel content. It’s like peeling an onion. One painful feeling or memory comes up. Tears flow, then subside, and healing comes. Then another shadow appears, another painful feeling. One after the other, after the other. Now I don’t even expect it to ever stop. But I do slowly slowly feel bigger, freer, more joyful.

My demon does show its face regularly, especially when I’m tired. ‘You’re so useless, you said you’d do this today, and you didn’t even get round to it’. But now I recognize it, and can answer back: ‘yes, I am tired, it doesn’t make me inadequate, actually, I’m pretty cool and fine as I am, I’m just going to have a little rest, then I can start again’.

At the end of the film “A beautiful mind”, the mathematician John Forbes Nash (acted by Russell Crowe) receives the Nobel Prize (all true story), and sees in the crowd the three imaginary characters created by his schizophrenia. He accepts he sees them though they don’t exist but he doesn’t feel threatened by them any more.

That is how I’d like to keep my demon: safely in the spotlight.

Now I’ve just spoken about this demon casually, yet it has been the scariest, most painful creature I’ve had to deal with in my life. Delivering babies without pain killers, a marathon, they were a walk in the park in comparison.

I have felt above the abyss, falling into a hole with no bottom, with no hope, just sheer pain, a pain of feeling disconnected, of not belonging, of not feeling good enough to belong.

However, what they say is true, if you stay with the pain, if you completely let yourself be taken by it, the wave eventually washes you up on the shore, feeling calm and safe.

The body comes with demons, but it also has an inbuilt mechanism for dealing with them.

The thing is, one has to look at them in the face. I could have taken anti depressants. Or pushed the pain away and tried to ignore it. But I really wanted to get to the bottom of it, deal with it as thoroughly as I could.

It doesn’t really matter how it’s done – anything where you allow yourself to see inside yourself, by yourself or accompanied. It could be writing, running, playing music, any form of healing or therapy or mindfulness practice. In my case, kundalini yoga has become a daily practice.

The added bonus is that not only do I have my demon squarely on my screen now, I have also been able to open up. I must have been too scared of being hurt before, I protected myself behind a wall. Now the wall has been lowered, and I can allow so many wonderful people and events into my life.

They’re strange things, these demons. They warp reality to such an extent that they give you fear where everyone else would agree there is no reason to fear.

Audrey Hepburn never felt good enough, yet what a model of grace, beauty and love. Her son Sean wrote “I can see her in the kitchen, preparing something wonderful. She really tried so hard, on every level, to please, be happy, be loved”.

Another demon is the fear of the future, of being hungry, of not having enough to pay the bills. It doesn’t matter that you have a secure job, savings in the bank, if you have that fear, a very real fear, you will fret. You might feel you need to control things and people around you, because the fear of what might happen if you don’t is just unbearable.

Yet another big one is the fear of death. The thought that it will all end, that people around you will disappear. The fear with every physical ailment that ‘that’s it, the end has come’.

 

It is tempting to blame the world for being wrong, but at the end of the day, it’s easier to change one’s programming and unmask the demon than change the world around you.

Nothing weakens a demon as being exposed, and it’s uncanny how people’s attitudes around you change as your demon weakens.

I had felt bullied and victimized, until I realized I had been my worse enemy, and called for that situation by always feeling I had to do more. I have now discovered that ‘no’ is a perfectly good answer.

 

Do I wish for everyone to unmask their demons? Yes, for there is such a fuller life to live if they’re tamed. But, it is no easy journey. It is more like Ulysse’s Odysseus. Maybe we don’t have a choice though: our demons are here, in the dark, acting on us whether we want it or not.