The Monster

My transformation, unwillingly, into that of the Monster.

..." I will watch with peace the
calm tongue of the tide
licking from the sand
the unclean story of mt heart."
-Edna Saint Vincent Millay

The Monster that resides within me, dormant and waiting, waiting and cruel, soon enough to come invade my psyche and pervade my efforts to be wholesome, to be good. My personality, my values, have long suffered the trickery of the Monster. The Monster never announces its arrival, but comes suddenly amidst the flowers and the sun they begin to wilt and the black pitch covers the casket of the sun and transforms all reality into a nightmare. The nightmare is no dream; it is as real as the hurricane that devours, kicking apart the land, destroying the homes and lives of people. Goodbye security; you have been ripped from me. There is no shelter; I am naked, standing like a tortured child before a pack of indecent pedophiles. The Monster kills me slowly and laughs, bitter hysterics as my friends and companions turn away and disappear as if I were grotesque and stale garbage. I get lost and there is no control to hold me down as I catapult into the regions of man that defile. The Monster makes me hate. The monster makes me Hell. Just how long will it abuse my life? Forever. When it ceases temporarily to toy with me and make of my life a brutal war, I feel as if I were reviving from a blackout, a coma. The evil may take leave for a time, bit its Hell, a thick resin, traumatizes the human left in me. I wake slowly to find the wreckage consuming and overwhelming. How do I fix this disturbance? How do I apologize and explain that I am not evil after I have smeared disaster across lives and vandalized the comfort of too many homes?  When will the monster trespass again and transform me into a bleak and hateful creature? When? This is the question that terrifies me day after day. This is the unknowing that makes me so close to the dead.

Author's Note

This is about my battle with manic-depression and mood disorder. Feel free to leave comments, criticism, anything this piece makes you feel or what it doesn't make you feel. I enjoy your input. Thank you.

Reviews

[spicedrop]

Wow. I read this and felt pain and anger on a roller-coaster.
"... standing like a tortured child before a pack of indecent pedophiles." What an image that conjures.
"... the unknowing that makes me so close to the dead."

Such powerful words and yet they convey, to me, exactly what I believe you are feeling. Wow.

[Victoria Hunter]

powerful memoir. You should consider collecting all your memoir and turning them all into several poems. If you are interested, in how to do this. You can contact me. I usually just write poetry, but I am considering writing memoirs first, or prose then turning them into poems.

[Philip Muls]

Your battle is familiar to me. You describe it well. It is inhuman and tears you down.

Take care.

[nosika]

This is a very raw piece, thank you for sharing it with the group.
Some suggestions: I would break this up into several paragraphs. You've got a lot to say, but it needs to be punctuated.
The description is beautiful. I love how you write that the nightmare is not a dream. That sentence really sticks with me.
Question: Is this the prologue to your memoir? Is it in the middle of your book? Where do you see this piece fitting in to the grand picture?
If it is in the beginning, the reader is going to want to know about you as a character. One of the strongest points of a memoir is being able to turn yourself into a character. What are your quirks? What do you look like? The reader needs concrete images in the beginning to ground themselves in the story.

This sounds like it will be a great memoir. Do you have an outline?
I am new to this site and am not quite sure how it works yet. Do you know how I post my writing to this group? I have an excerpt of my memoir on here, but I'm not sure if anyone can see it.

I hope my critique has been helpful and keep writing!

[slappy white]

You do an amazing job putting one in your head with this; you establish empathy with your readers which is hard to do. It had a relentless pace to it, with all the different ways the internal monster haunts you, which recreates in words the experience of actually living through it, relentless. As one who's struggled with depression, I really appreciate this.