My kids sometimes ask me if monsters exit. I tell them that monsters aren’t real. They aren’t hiding under their beds or in their closet. There is no such thing.
But I think we all know that’s not exactly true. Monsters very much do exist. They just aren’t ten feet tall with horns. We each have our monster. Mine is anxiety.
For me, anxiety was always there. I remember being five or six and hearing about AIDS for the first time. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was bad. So surely I had it. And for me, compulsions were always quietly there. They aren’t strong. They don’t define me. They are all mental. But still. I do my mental gymnastics, and I probably always will.
I was talking about anxiety today. I was discussing current minor anxieties, and I remembered back to when there was no such thing as a minor anxiety.
I spent most of my twenties living in two different worlds. I was in the outside world. The one where I went to school or taught. Where I had friends and conversations and responsibilities.
And then there was the real world. Or at least the one that felt the most real. This was the world inside my head. Whole lifetimes could go on in my head in the matter of mere moments in the outside world.
The outside world was usually calm and ordered and predictable. The real world, the world inside, was anything but. A black circle would start somewhere in my chest. It would almost immediately work its way to my brain. My brain would find a reason to obsess, and the black would take over the entire world. It would cloud my every moment. It was fuzzy, and it swirled, like I was inside one of those machines that spin faster and faster around you while you try to remain some sort of equilibrium in the center.
There was no way out. Or so I thought.
I had a student once write a paper about treatments for anxiety disorders. She was writing it from a place of hope. She said people can recover. There is a way out. Silently, I scoffed. Surely she had a cute little form of anxiety. Perhaps she was a bit jittery or worried too much about due dates or natural disasters. She couldn’t keep up with me. My anxiety could not be quelled. It could not be treated.
I found a sort of perverse pride when I would speak with therapists. They would tell me how severe my anxiety was. They would tell me that there were biochemical abnormalities that must be dealt with because the ordinary coping mechanisms and treatment methods simply weren’t working.
I used that as proof. The anxiety is real. It’s me. There’s no way to separate the two.
But then I was sitting there tonight, and I was talking about anxiety, and I was talking in the past tense. Yes, I absolutely most certainly still have serious anxiety. But the days of living in two worlds are few and far between. Yes my brain always works about ten times as fast as I think it should. Yes, I obsess. But it’s not the same. That black cloud is gone. And I only know that because I still get brief glimpses of it. And normally I am lucky enough to watch it pass away.
I use the word luck because as much as I probably should give myself credit for overcoming those darkest of days, I can’t. It still feels out of my control. It still feels bigger than me. It is still my greatest fear. My monster.
I sit here in relative peace, and I still ask myself why. It is the question I can remember asking for as long as I can remember. Why does this have to happen to me? Why my brain? Why my brain? Because when the problem is in your brain and your heart, nothing else goes right. Because that’s where it all starts — in the brain and in the heart.
But then I think back to before it got so dark, before the monsters made themselves fully known, and I start to wonder if the reason is possibly that the monsters are our greatest teachers. What if it is the monsters that make us human? What if they take the bones and the soul and the heart and like clay, the monsters mold us into more fuller versions of ourselves.
We all have gifts to give and to share. But what if our greatest offering to the world is our brokenness? We can all relate to the joy in others. We can laugh and relax and make merry. It’s easy to love the good. But it also can leave us a bit distant. What really unites us to others are the broken parts. It’s seeing the weary in another’s eyes and seeing yourself. It’s seeing fear in another and recognizing that it’s the same beast that lives within chest.
Our monsters don’t need to be the same. It’s that they exist that brings us together.
Show me a smile and I will see a happiness. Show me a tear, and I will see a soul.
I look at my girls, and I constantly worry that they will fall prey to the same monsters I have. I look for every possible glimpse, trying to stave it off as soon as it shows its face. I want to protect them. I want them to stay innocent and whole and unbroken.
But as diligent as I may be, I can’t protect them from the monsters that were created for them. And perhaps in the long run, I wouldn’t even want to. To completely protect them from the battle would also protect them from the prize.
God gave me these three precious, beautiful little souls. They are my suns. But the sun needs to meet the storm in order for the rainbow to appear.
I know they will falter. We all do. And my heart will break every single time they do. But I hope I can trust that they will rise above.
And I hope that one day I will trust myself to falter. I hope I will look at my monsters and I will stand up strong and stare them down. I hope someday I will see my journey and I will see victory rather than luck.
It took me a long time to get here, and it will take me a long time to get there. But the race isn’t to the swift. And that’s good because I’m running with monsters on my back.