Feeding your inner demons after midnight

I’ve written about this sort of stuff before; self-sabotage and keeping good things at bay in order to protect yourself from getting your hopes inevitably crushed to tiny fragments. But as the temperature outside shoots through the roof and the sun peeks through the clouds on a more regular basis, depression starts rearing its ugly head, yet again. Which brings my thoughts to my definition of happiness. Despite knowing a lot better, I’ve always viewed it as a constant, something you become, that which makes you you – one of those annoying shiny happy people. So, naturally, I’ve done my best to stop myself from falling into the ‘happiness trap’ by planting and cultivating dumb, destructive ideas in my own head, such as ‘no happy person ever wrote a decent song’, or ‘happiness makes you ignorant to other people’s suffering’, ‘it’s better to not have known happiness at all, than to grieve its inevitable departure once you’ve fucked everything up’. You get the gist:

To me, allowing myself something that would bring even the smallest likelihood of experiencing happiness meant I’d lose my depth, my integrity, my ability to write resonant lyrics. But now I’m thinking; who the hell decided we’ve got to be so bloody deep all the bloody time? I’ll tell you who most certainly didn’t – someone in a state of happiness.

Did you ever watch that film Happiness for Beginners, where a divorce leads to the main character going on a quest – both literally and figuratively – to find what she thinks is happiness, only to encounter layers and layers of happy accidents that make up so much more than what she’d envisioned as her initial goal? A nuanced cluster of emotion, knowledge, compassion, grief and letting go of the fear of what might happen if you dared being completely true to yourself.

Fuck me, that sounded a bit pretentious, eh?

Regardless, baring your soul to yourself, for yourself, is scary as fuck! You’ve spent all this time curating different masks for every possible event, that you feel rather naked without them, and only that next level rock bottom shit can make you feel the need to do such a thing. When you’re so far below the initial rock bottom that you just cannot be bothered to keep up the charade. At least that’s what I believe to be true for myself.

And then comes the choice between finding solace (i.e. temporary lobotomy) at the bottom of a whisky bottle, or venturing into something as self-indulgent as neuro-linguistic programming – “a set of principles and techniques aimed at enhancing self-awareness, increasing confidence, building communication skills and motivating positive social actions” – after gaslighting yourself into believing you’ll be able to open yourself to such a thing. You can read more about NLP in this Psychology Today article. Turns out, the bullshit factor vaporises when you put the work in.

An article on the US National Institutes of Health referred to the treatment as “old wine in a new glass“, which I can get behind. Although not yet a recognised form of psychotherapy, NLP is very much just the re-programming/un-learning of unhelpful tactics learned over time, much akin to cognitive behavioural therapy. Although with a little less emphasis on the psychoanalysis of trauma and a little more on introducing new ideas that are, in essence, better for you long-term. Which makes me think that this whole unlearning malarkey is a little bit overrated and perhaps even – dare I say it – unnecessary. I don’t want to appear too bombastic about this: there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to matters of the mind. And I’m certainly not about to knock CBT, which cam be tremendously helpful for a lot of people. But, some alternatives/variations/deviation are welcome.

So, what’s all this to do with demons and happiness? Was this header just clickbait, and there’s not even one single reference to either Charmed nor Buffy?

Well, I like to think that we’ve all got a tiny cluster of mini demons – cute wee ones, like Gizmo before his midnight feed, or, you know, Spike – living happily right up there in the prefrontal cortex of every child, but every so often, some ill-tempered adult drops a hefty scoop of angel dust-like protein powder in there, just to se what’ll happen. That’s when the shit starts to stir. For most, the good kind of childhood resilience will help take care of the aftereffects of the protein overdose. Yet, for some, the crooked kind of resilience they’ve been dealt means they just push everything down until it starts spilling out between the threadbare seams that struggle to hold them together and the demons in. One little crack turns into an explosion, where the debris and shrapnel gets sucked into the black hole left by the big boom, but the black hole is no ordinary black hole into which shit disappears.

No, sir. It’s a door to a parallel universe, where the shrapnel whittles down the debris into pointy, stabby things that – once properly sharpened – returns through its own rectum, only to stab the unsuspecting victim from the inside. This, in turn, causes a person the sort of trauma a person must go through in order to write a song like, say, Hurt. NIN or Aguilera, it doesn’t really matter. Those of us that keep feeding the demons, instead of letting them starve. The ones that need to feel like they can help the demon and not realising that, in the process, they are doing the opposite to themselves. The ones making sure everyone else’s gas oxygen mask is on before even contemplating locating one for themselves.

That’s it – it’s all demon fodder. But, hey, maybe some of the cute ones are worth it.

That’s it for today. Like always, I shall see you next Tuesday. Until then, enjoy this banger from Razorbats in the video below: