The world we live in is without magic but full of monsters. My monster has two faces. The first is a creeping, disgusting, withered old man. Every time I attempt something new I’m harassed by him.

My monster is sneaky. It know if it tells me outright what I can and can’t do, I will automatically try and defy it. I don’t take kindly to those kind of threats and it knows that, it knows me all too well.

Instead the monster works inside of me, twisting my insides, mangling my reactions. It can control reactions that should belong to nature and circumstance alone. It’s unnatural but works hard to seem like a native, real response. It mimics and camouflages and disguises itself inside of me until my trust is gone and my body is my enemy. It pits me against myself.

The monster is so well disguised, it can be impossible to find and identify. Part of its power is the multitude of illusions it possesses, the appearances it can take. It puffs itself up, shouts, waves, screams, anything to make itself look more important and lethal than it actually is. It works inside my body, screaming about the many ways it’s going to kill me, how this is the end. It presents the frighteningly real, unlimited emptiness of the all encompassing dark void. It squeezes until my entire self, entire personality is transformed. I sit, shaking, convinced of the concrete nature of its claims.

Yet they have never come true. I’m still here and no physical elements of myself have changed. Time passes, the shadow passes over and I remain.

At first I believed it was because the monster had no real power. It pretended to possess these abilities because it was weak, pathetic and small. Eventually I could laugh at it. I felt because I understood its ineffectuality, it would go away. The power would be destroyed, losing its grip and slipping away, as if the northern wind had reached inside me and carried it off.

Then I saw its real face. 

Anxiety by *Hito76 on deviantART

It truly is a master of disguises, a snake among the grass. When I thought I had it figured out, it simply flipped around and tried again. Understanding the lack of physical damage made the monster easier to face but it didn’t stop the attacks. It didn’t stop the effects, the fear, the panic. It doesn’t stop it at all.

It was only then that I realised its full power. It never wanted me to die, never even cared if I believed it could. Even if it could kill, it wouldn’t. If I died, where would be the fun, the game? 

The real goal is constraint, limiting me by controlling me. It doesn’t outwardly limit what I do, it can’t make me move, it can’t make me stay at home. But it kidnaps my mind, ensuring I’m never fully where I’m meant to be. Instead, a part of me will always belong to it, will always be dedicated to it. When that happens, I’m feeding it. The more I think about it, the more real it becomes.

It needs me. It need me to believe in it, to battle with it. It will try and make me stay, try and ensure I don’t go too far without it. I can run as fast and as far as I can but it’s not letting up.

I can see it clearly now. It is still small but the energy has changed, I can feel strength emanating from it as it stands tough in front of me. It wears a stubborn, determined look upon its face. The face is wrinkled, wizened and the eyes look firmly into mine through narrowed slits. That is where the differences end though. The face is my own, only it has been twisted and ravaged. It is a hard, bitter face, scornful and alone. It is the very worst part of me.

The enemy is not my body but my mind. It will kill itself. I must not let it. 

Turn away from the darkness, let the light into your heart

We are always urged to turn away from the dark, to constantly improve the blackness of our souls. Life is presented as a struggle between good and evil, light and dark. We feel we know which side we’re meant to be on, even if it’s the difficult path to choose. The noble or delusional pour their time and effort into burning the dark away from inside.

Why bother?

We are born of the dark and cannot survive without it. We can’t live in it, but neither can we live solely in the light, slowly burning away to nothing. Time and time again, the dark draws us in, constantly. It’s so deeply attractive that, it calls to us, we are bound by it. 

Imagine we were all light. There is no blackness in you, no shadow. Where would you hide? What sort of protection do we have? The essence of ourselves is that which we choose to remain hidden, our trump cards or secrets that we retain the ultimate power over; the power to conceal.

If light suddenly shone into the deepest areas of consciousness, it would be truly terrifying. We need darkness as much as we need light. Without one, the other cannot exist. The eternal balance of the universe

An update: it has been a while for two reasons. Firstly, I’ve been extremely with work and life and other distractions. Secondly, I’ve actually been fairly good at motivating myself to write. And thirdly, no one reads this anyway so it’s ok :)

For now, my big project has been put aside. I don’t have a clear direction and I’m really not good enough yet. But I don’t care, it’s ok once I’m writing. I find myself not doing it for a goal but for enjoyment and for improving myself. I’ve let most of the pressure go, it was stifling. I’ve only kept on the pressure to continue to write. That is the only thing that matters.

Like many writers do, I work well with deadlines. With that in mind I’ve begun entering short story competitions. They provide a very real sense of accomplishment and give me something to do with my writing prompts. I can’t post anything more than drabbles here though if I do plan on showing them anywhere, but no matter.

Time is an issue though, as it always seems to be now. I always had too much time, lolling around and procrastinating constantly throughout school and college. I’m unsure how I managed to fill my days really, I certainly wasted a lot of time and brain power doing nothing. Now I have some motivation and drive, I can’t find the hours in the day to fit them all in. So it goes

A friend asked me to rewrite a Shakespearean sonnet using ‘moo’ as often as possible. I think I did one better:

Shall I compare moo to a Summer’s hay?
Moo art more lovely and more melodic:
Methane do shake the darling calves of May,
And Summer’s milk hath a short use-by date:
Sometime too hot the barn of cattle hinds,
And oft’ is bovine complexion dimm’d;
And every fare from sirloins oft declines,
By chance or butcher’s leaving fat untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Steakhouse shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair beef burger;
Nor shall Death brag moo was dairy made,
When in eternal livestock time moo growest:

So long as men eat steak, or Friesians be,
So long lives moo, and moo gives life to thee.

PART ONE

That was the year my father died and everything began to kick off.

Allow me to explain. Daddy decided to kick the bucket in the middle of both his sweet darlings formative years and his investing company’s rather public demise in the face of widespread corruption charges. Which one he was trying to avoid the most, no one can quite say as he failed to let us know what he was thinking before he blew his brains out in the pantry.

Not that you could ever argue Daddy didn’t have our best interests at heart. He chose the pantry because of all the dozens of rooms in our Hampton home, that was the one nobody in his immediate family would ever step inside. It was left to Therese, our jiggly Columbian housemaid, to discover him and notify the authorities. It was also left to her to continually discover and remove the additional skull shards wedged between the cans of tinned fruit over the subsequent weeks and months. He knew no Truvelt would ever have to deal with the daily reminder of his suicide and for that we must thank his remarkable foresight and conscientiousness.

As much as he was openly scorned in our family for his passive (compared to the rest of us anyway) demeanour and soft manners, his violent passing ended up being a landmark event, the domino in the Truvelt family sage that I’ll attempt to condense in a sardonic, amusing fashion.

Washing the stain of the Hunger Games ending out of my mind…..

Now that I am a bit more in writing zone, mentally speaking, I find myself more and more writing for pleasure. In the last 2 weeks especially, I’ve found a grace and an ease to my writing which I had been missing for so long. Words and phrases come quicker and leave me far more satisfied than when I started. 

I haven’t worked on my big project for over a week now but the important thing is I have been writing. I find myself more and more just scribbling something down and not caring whether it is quite up to scratch. Every word gets me further to my goal, even if it isn’t the perfect word. 

I’ve even written a short story, my first in I-don’t-know-when. And it’s not completely shit which is just indescribably lovely to say. It’s not hard anymore (for now) and I find myself not even worrying about my novel project because once I’m writing and stretching out the mental muscles I’m happy. 

Useful tip, I’ve been using this super stellar Writing Prompts tumblr for some ideas to get the ball rolling :)

can’t write….reading The Hunger Games….