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The Banality of Monsters
I have been drawing since the age of 2, but I truly became a ‘serious’ artist when I discovered the joys of using a ballpoint pen in 2016.
In the process of learning how to use ballpoint pens, I created an illustrated short story. The pieces below are from the story, drawn between 2016 and 2019. The full story is below the gallery.
THE STORY
I always daydream; that’s not new. Doodling absentmindedly, that’s just me. If my daydreams and doodles have taken a darker turn lately…who knows. It’s probably just the food I’m eating, a series of nightmares I can’t remember.
The unpleasant thoughts continue. So much so that I am not even sure if I am the one who is making them. Something is out there — an entity I do not understand, which seems to be bearing down on me at all times. A ghost, a demon, something like that?
I am trying to ignore it. For the most part, pretending it’s not there kind of works.
Even so, I must admit that I’ve been hearing weird things at my door before I sleep.
Whatever this thing is (these things are?), it’s getting difficult to ignore. Not just spooky things before I sleep, but something I see out of the corner of my eye, though I can never seem to get a direct look. I feel its presence near me at all times, like it follows me. Like it’s stuck to me.
It’s stronger now, even though I still can’t see it. But I know where in my body it must be hiding, because I haven’t seen a blue sky in weeks.
It can’t be seen, but it can be felt — literally. The way I feel ought to make me a wreck in public, but the monster controls my face and makes me smile. I want to tell my friends that something’s wrong, to show them, but it pulls the water back from the tear ducts. Then, when I’m alone, it makes me convulse and sob even when I don’t want to. Sometimes it makes my hands attack me; my fingers scratch away layers of my own skin.
I had a moment of heroic resistance, and cut my nails. The next day, the monster found a small knife. I have cut my left arm 37 times in the last month, reopening the old cuts each time so they are guaranteed to become scars — punishment, maybe, for trying to fight back.
Just as how you see more complexity in people when you get to know them, familiarity with this presence has allowed me to count at least 11 different monsters. It may be that there are thousands of these things, and my puny human brain can only recognize 11. Perhaps they are all just one monster with many personalities. Regardless…
The Fast Monster makes my thoughts race until I worry my heart will stop. The Slow Monster does what you’d expect — the opposite. There’s a monster for each of the seven deadly sins: a monster of lust that won’t let me love; Pride, who humbles me routinely; Envy, who makes me despise most people I know. Wrath calms me down and steadies my hand when I hurt myself. When I want to resist, Gluttony gives me a distraction, Greed tells me to work harder, and Sloth tells me I should give it a shot tomorrow, when I’m better rested. When I try to rest, the Awake Monster won’t let me sleep, and when I have things to do, the Sleepy Monster smothers me in bed. From a distance, I suppose it’s all very comical.
At some point countless thousands of years ago, we grew capable of abstraction, and in turn learned to fear the creatures of the underworld. And those creatures, having discovered prey, became predators.
We have, in every era and every region, tried everything humanly possible to outrun the monsters. For most, it has worked. For most, it will continue to work. From the family unit, to the first pyramid, to the last rocketship that will leave this planet in search of something beyond, humans eternally prove to be a resilient species.
But throughout the ages, there were always those unlucky few who found themselves staring into the void, unconvinced by the structures their peers believed in. Those few became prey. They have been called many different names, all of which are connected by the same subconscious throughline: bewitched, possessed, haunted, crazy.
I’m critically-minded, and so I decided to give the world a chance to tell me I’m wrong about the way I see things. I found therapists and people in white coats, and gave them a palatable version of events. Rather than, for example, literal demons that scream in my ears at night, I told them I have “inner demons,” or some other similarly contrived cliche. If I gave them the truth — the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — they would put me into a straitjacket.
They are well-intentioned. I just wish they weren’t so authoritative. Maybe their other patients find confidence comforting, but I find it disingenuous. I strongly suspect they are mostly reassuring themselves when they speak to me.
I try at times to return to the world I knew. I jog. I do the exercises on the worksheet my therapist gave me.
But I am one of the haunted, not meant to fall for the illusions that have bewitched everyone else. When I’m in public, I find everyone’s eyes look glazed, and their smiles creep me out. I can relate to them about as much as I can relate to puppets. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing? I replay the same memories that I have always revisited, and find that they are different this time; the facts of them do not change, but their lessons do. In revealing themselves to me, the monsters have lifted a veil from my eyes, and I don’t intend to put it back into place.
One could argue that I voluntarily feed the monsters, and that’d be a fair point. At this point the relationship is more symbiotic than parasitic. I say let them eat — it’s worth the insight I gain. But why pretend choice is a relevant issue here?
Free will is an illusion. I rationalize most decisions after I decide to make them — and anyone sufficiently introspective should conclude the same. It just so happens that the monsters make this point so apparent that it is impossible to ignore.
Call me an edgelord, I don’t care. I never chose to fire the neuron that fired the neuron that fired the neuron — and so on — that led to this moment.
I must confess that I am a bit tired. I was — I still am — addicted to the insights the monsters yield, but I am finding that I cannot continue to carry the burden.
In the movies, the demon gets exorcised. If the demon could not be exorcised though, what would the clinical debate be? Surely one who suffers from a severe haunting would be entitled to the same rights as a terminally ill cancer patient? Hospice and medically-assisted suicide for the very old and the terminally ill are supposedly humane because the patients only have a short amount of time left anyway. But that logic is in fact perverse, because it implies it’s fine for a younger person like me to spend decades upon decades suffering pointlessly: it’d only be after a lifetime of pain that I would be spared of my last few months.
I’ve written my notes. It probably won’t stop them from calling me a coward, selfish, stupid. They’ll say I had my whole life ahead of me, as if that wasn’t the problem. I’m not heartless, it’s not like I want to hurt anyone — but if anyone would have me suffer longer, perhaps they don’t love me as much as they think they do.
Anyway, I suppose this is my last entry. I’m checking the train schedules, and then I’ll head out.
Clearly, I did not take the train. I will not say what stopped me. It’s private. Hearing the voice of one last friend I called to say goodbye, a concerned look from someone on the train platform, a text from my mom asking when I’m coming to visit — use your imagination.
The moment I was interrupted from the monsters’ trance, my conviction wavered, and the instant I realized I was not sure about doing it, I knew in my bones I did not want to do it; and once I got back home, I was overwhelmed with gratitude to have returned. I am reluctant to lean on the old lightbulb cliche, so…
It’s been two weeks since the incident, and while I can still feel the monsters bearing down on me, they’re muted. It gives me hope that if I try my hardest, I might be able to hold onto that initial feeling of relief and understanding, even though it only lasted about a second. If I do it right, if I keep that feeling close to my heart for the rest of my life, there may yet come a day when I don’t hear the monsters anymore.
I guess that was a bit much to ask for. A day of silence, a week, and then one hour of demonic possession that sends me back to square one. A pessimist might say it’s like walking one step forward and then retreating two steps back. An optimist would say it’s the opposite. Realistically, it’s probably more like jogging in place (until you die). Hourly, weekly, monthly, yearly — however the interval evolves, it’s still just a cycle until the very end.
It has been years since the monsters first knocked on my door, and years since we settled into an effective detente. I allow them to feed at subsistence levels, so they are just barely strong enough to whisper a few thoughts and nothing else. Ironically, if I tried to be rid of them entirely, they would fight back just as hard — it’s more practical to be a pacifist.
I once hoped for a life without them. I no longer do. Some may consider that a sign of weakness, submission, but I don’t think that was the right thing to hope for to begin with. Life is richer with them than without them, and while I pity anyone in the throes of a full haunting, I also feel sorry for those who have never known the monsters at all.
Monsters do allow for some insight into the world — though not as much as they’d have you believe — and provided you have kept them in their place, you will find meaning in the most mundane things. You may be startled to find clarity in the fog of a sleepless night, or sweetness in the salt of your tears. Even the emptiness might give you some space to explore.
Too much vague artsy bullshit? Fair enough. I can supply a practical example: I have consistently enjoyed drawing since I first started doing it at the age of two. Something about the way the haunting changed my vision changed my relationship to drawing — before I enjoyed it, whereas now I cannot live without it, and before it was just drawing, but now (to me), it is art. So it’s not all bad, right? All I can guarantee you is that your story, like mine, will not be dramatic.
