On Beginnings and Monsters

First sentences are always hard. Firsts are hard anyway. I'm not sure if it's just me, but it feels as though my life is built around searching for the courage to take the first step, somehow taking it, then trying to get used to it and keeping it going. Doing everything on autopilot.

I'm not entirely sure what I think of when I speak of "firsts." What lingers most in my mind is a tiny fragment: I'm at work, quiet again, in my default mode. Every silent minute makes it harder to start speaking. I tell myself, if only someone would ask me something I know the answer to, so I could start. I look for something from the outside. If I'm in a good mood, I ask, "How was your day yesterday?" But I can't find anything of myself in my first sentences.

Performance anxiety. As if I'm on stage at every moment. How can someone feel on stage all the time? It sounds like a good thing. But it isn't. What lies behind my words? I laughed at this, I didn't understand that, I didn't like this, this made me sad. Someone might see me behind my sentence. There must be things hidden. I must hide.

I look at the person next to me; they are sharing something they find funny, talking freely, genuinely enjoying themselves. In that moment, I find it funny too, and I laugh. Their laughter seems amusing to me; how fearlessly they do it seems amusing. No, nobody is judging them. Or maybe I am judging them, looking down with such condescension. Or perhaps I'm empathizing, wondering, what if they feel the same way I do? And deep down, I think I'm consoling them by laughing along. Let them not get hurt, let them not end up like me, I think. Is there an egotistical, condescending person inside me, or someone empathetic and compassionate?

No, there is a monster inside me. A monster fighting against me. I have fought that monster so relentlessly that I see other people's monsters, too, and I smile at them. I want someone to see my monster and gently pat its head. If someone's hand touches that monster, I feel so happy. Because I cannot touch it. I understand it, but I cannot love it. Because it's not like other people's monsters.

Yet I am the one who imprisoned it. I am the one who starved it, deprived it of water, and kept it from the sunlight. That monster has never seen the sky. That is why it's so fierce. The others' monsters are happier, better fed, more beautiful, because they have seen the sun.

Actually, theirs are not monsters at all; they are the people themselves. There is no monster inside anyone. I wanted there to be; I wanted to know that they, too, fight that monster every day just like I do.

I admit it: theirs are not monsters.

Neither is mine.

There is only one monster, and that is me — my own self.

Dissecting the Mind: The Stage, The Shadow, and Radical Confrontation

1. The "Default Mode" and Stage Fright: Silence is not peace; it is a fortress built against vulnerability — the dread of exposing what one laughs at, fails to grasp, or mourns. Feeling perpetually on stage triggers an instinctive need to hide.
2. Social Mirroring and Empathy as a Shield: Awe at another's uninhibited laughter quickly collapses into sharp self-interrogation: Is it condescension or empathy? In truth, consoling the other is merely a projection, an unconscious effort to protect one's own fragility through a surrogate.
3. The Monster Metaphor and The Shadow: Unable to integrate its own rage and pain, the psyche detaches them into an autonomous "monster." Longing for an outside hand to gently pat this beast exposes a desperate plea for the tenderness the author cannot grant themselves.
4. Neglect and Radical Catharsis: The beast's ferocity is not intrinsic; it is the direct result of systemic self-neglect — starved of warmth and kept from the light. When the illusion of a collective struggle dissolves, the final truth remains: There is no mythical beast in the dark. The only monster is the neglected self, unmasked.

Condescension and pity were never shields; they were merely the most pathetic ways to mask pure envy of others' courage to simply exist. And there was never a mythical monster to begin with. The beast was just a cheap excuse invented to romanticize inadequacy, fear, and emotional starvation. You were the one who locked yourself in the dark, and you were the one waiting for a stranger to reach down and comfort you. The bitter reality is that no one is coming to open that door — because you are both the solitary prisoner and the only jailer