A Monster Of Apathy

I am a monster of apathy. A creature of habit and a purveyor of fantasy.

A born dreamer, I forged my own way of the maverick. Unconventional. Thinking outside of the box.

Without siblings, without a father, and without proper guidance, I have waded through the shallow waters of life, creating my own path and re-writing life’s logic to fit my own.

An outcast from the normal practices of family life, I have always struggled to understand what normal is. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t care about things. I do. I care about good succeeding over bad, I care about the wrongs done to the meek. I care about animals and how we continue to shunt them off the edge of the planet, and I care about living.

But the monster inside numbs me to the horrors of life. The death and destruction we have easy witness access to - courtesy of the “Cloud,” feeds his dark nature, makes him turn my gaze away from injustice, and isolates me from the world. Like an ostrich burying its head in the ground, he makes me wait for the world to move on, so he can control the narrative.

Death is his fuel for torment. I haven’t grieved at any of the generation before me when they have passed from this existence. The monster wouldn’t let me.

“Emotion is a weakness,” he says. “Never let them see your tears, for it will be used against you, in time.”

As a young teenager, I lost my grandfather. It was a shock to my young senses, but I shed no emotion. I felt sad that he had gone, but life went on. The monster made sure of that. Made me think I was an adult and forced me to seek work over furthering my education. A lucky break a few years later, put me back on the knowledge path, but it didn’t resolve my indifference to grief.

When my grandmother died, I shed no tears. I just felt a loss of the person who had been my second mother. I also felt a painful regret that I had chosen to live so far away from her, that I wasn’t there when she left us. I lost one uncle after another. Distance prevented me from paying homage in person to one, and disbelief prevented me from acknowledging the other was no longer with us. But I carried on living and laughing, like nothing had changed.

Then came my mother’s demise. I couldn’t get away from her quick enough most of my life, so emotional barriers were erected on my side of the line as a defensive measure against feeling any empathy. That gave the monster the power to desensitise me, to keep my mother at arm’s length, subsequently creating a breakdown in communication between her and me.

Like a battle-weary soldier, I told myself that grief doesn’t matter. Just carry on without remembrance for the departed. Deep down in the bowels of my monster’s scheming world, I feel a surge of conscience forming in my memories. I know that he is plotting to destroy me, because he knows that guilt will chip away any self-esteem, I have managed to build over my lifetime. He knows that grief will age me and erode my mental faculties, drawing energy from the places I need to recharge and that engaging with my emotions will weaken me.

Perhaps, life is the monster. The peaks and valleys of a lifetime of accomplishments and failures stretching my emotional endurance to its limits. But I don’t want to blame life. Blaming life is like taking an exit from it, and I don’t want that. I want to fight this monster, but I don’t know how. All I can do is ignore the damage he causes.

Disengaging from the pain has made me forget that anguish and hurt are a part of life, but how else should I deal with sorrow? I no longer have the generation before me to turn to for advice. I am an orphan. I am a lost soul that has succumbed to the temptation of demons that I constantly have to fight to maintain my existence. The same demons that have me curled up into a shell, like a sunless flower. However, I realise I need to break free of the shackling bonds my monster has imprisoned me with. I need to re-join the living - no matter how painful that may be.

I need to find a way to acknowledge the past and embrace its lessons, but the monster disagrees. He tells me he exists simply for protective measures and that he has my best interests at heart – that he is the only way to maintain my sanity in a frenzied world. At times, I buy his veiled explanation. At other times, I wonder if I am being hoodwinked by an evil entity that cares less about me and more about control, and if it’s control, then why? What good can he gain from controlling me?

I like to think that I make my own decisions in life. That I am in control. But am I? Is anyone in control of their own lives? Do we all have monsters within us that want to rule us, and if so, how can we ever take back control again after we have lost it? How do we exorcise the demons holding us back, forcing us to repeat the mistakes we’ve already atoned for?

Age now dictates my physical sense. Time passes by in forgotten fleeting moments until all that remains are memories of excruciating regret. I fought that counterfactual emotion most of my adult life. Little did I realise that it would grow inside me like a fungus slowly eroding the mental barriers that protect me from total melancholy – another monster and destroyer of minds.

Monsters are not always living, breathing beings. They can exist as inner voices that drive us blindly forward or materialise as fear holding us back in eternal ambiguity. They are indecisive, they are sanctimonious, and they are a danger to our well-being - more so when we become them. That’s when we find ourselves lost to the world.

My monster blinkers my eyes to only what he wants me to see. In a destructive world, he thrives beyond the grasp of apprehension, running wild among the fields of my buried regret. He anaesthetises me against the cruelty of mankind and continues to distract my attention from the cold hard truths of reality, like he is playing a waiting game, ready to unleash all the pain at once. He is correct in the assumption that I need protecting, but it is he that I need protecting from. He is not me, but I fear I am turning into him. No matter how hard I fight to gain the upper hand, he relentlessly battles me with every waking step I take - my only sanctuary being my dreams. He has no power to permeate my slumber. It is when I awake that he regenerates and drains my strength from me. With my eyes open, my resolve diminishes and any hope of ridding my person of him quickly fades into my dissipating dreamscape.

In a gradual erosive passage of time, he has successfully consumed me, changed me, and waits for his moment of conquest. If there was a way back to a moment before the pain, I would gladly embrace it and learn to live with it. Possibly use it to strengthen me. But it may be too late, because over a lifetime of avoidance, I have metamorphosised into a monster of apathy - a callous crusader against heartache. Perhaps, it’s for the good, for when I leave this world, who will want to grieve for me…?