Personal Demons - 2008-2009
All Personal Demons collected in alphabetical order.
My Personal Demon is loneliness. When I get lonely I don't always do the best things for myself.
I know it's out of fashion, but I still think of myself in the terms of transactional analysis. My stance is that I'm not okay and you are, the "you" being everyone else. So when I feel lonely, it amplifies my sense of being inadequate and sends me on a search for affirmation. This is especially problematic if my support network is otherwise occupied. I may seek to blot out my misery through self medication of alcohol or other mind numbing substances. I may seek out an online chat with a stranger whom I hope to impress. I may escape into narcissistic fantasies. All of these behaviors run significant risks of being self destructive.
~ Alec
My personal demon is lack of patience.
~ Allison
ok, personal demon -- definitely my confidence, or lack-there-of. historically, it's been about my body/looks (made the whole going-bald delightfully ironic, really). but that's been better (yay 30s!). now it is firmly floating around my dissertation -- like my own modern angel-of-the-house needing a swift slaying (but where is virginia woolf when you need her? i'm not afraid of her at all!). it's oppressive, vacilating around questioning my capability, my purpose, whether my work has any meaning, whether it (the diss, this career at all) is the "right" thing to do, whether i'll be satisfied, whether i'll die alone having never lived up to my "potential" nor found love nor had children nor made any damn difference in the world...
~ Amanda
My personal demon, is the Inner Hollow.
~ Andrew
Obsession. The act, not the cologne. It masquerades as perfection or accomplishment and hence its demon-like quality. Alas, I have yet to meet my succubus.
~ Ankur
Diet coke?
Also, anger and impatience, leading to full-fledged frustration. Those seven deadlies will trip me up every time.
~ Annie
I am taking personal daemons to mean... those things that eat at you inside and become the root cause of your stress. Right now in my life I am lucky to say I only truly have one thing that stresses me out. I am in a good place. My boyfriend (of 5 years, whom I live with) is planning to join the military, while I know it will be good for him and I think it is something he somehow needs in his life, its scares me. There is no way to tell what this is going to bring and this is what I would consider my current daemon.
~ Anonymous
I fear fatherhood. I mean, I'm not yet having a son, but when I was younger I never saw myself having children. I wondered if I would be too aloof, if I would be like my own father, not making much of an imprint on things one way or another. What if my kid and I never connected? Or what if we shared a deep connection and then one day they just somehow become lost to me. Would I be able to let the thought of him/her go? Or would it feel like a limb ripped from its socket, twitching and painful, and unbearable. Anyway, at some point, I decided It would be worth the risk, and hopefully, some day I will be the father that I want to be.
~ Anonymous
My demon.... Fear of being a boring, fat, washed-up mother who pretends to be an artist when convenient.
The truth sucks. :)
~ Anonymous
My inner demon is an ancient thing, he is lythe and sensual, compact but athletic. He is utterly hairless and femine, he is a he despite the fact that he lacks gentials. He never wears any clothing and he has painted himself black with paint made thick from the ashes of the dead. He uses the black as camo to hide in the shadows and wait and watch. He loves watching more than anything. He wears the bones of the dead, their teeth, their jaws, their fingers, the bones that make them most human, those that they use to gesture or speak or take in the sensory overload of life. Once life is snuffed out the body is usless but he keeps these as tokens, reminders of what makes life exciting. Despite his obsession with life he is savage and violent, he rapes and kills his victims. He stalks them with careful intent and once he has used them up he mutlilates their eyes and genitals. To be honest I don't understand exactly why he does that but he does. He never speaks. His teeth are small and sharp, animal like, shark like. When he hides in the shadows he is a hunter stalking his prey but when he removes himself and stands out in the open he is a dangerous helper. He'll show me things to help guide me but his aid always has to be questioned because his goals are animalistic and immediate, he never looks to future consequinses but always serves immediate desire. He creeps like a spider with long slender limbs, he has no home except for the shadows of the world. Like a fairy tale creature he can pass into a shadow in one place and travel to any shadow he pleases no matter how far away. While he cannot kill other mythological creatures (my inner mythology here) he can and does terroize and brutilize them. He has no name but uses ancient magic to serve him, magic of the earth. He must be a priest from some ancient tribe, a shaman who gave up his body to be host to lifes darkness. His body is deformed, elongated, fingers and toes with too many digits, finger nails long and sharp, eyes small and around, completely black, not a hair on his body, no nipples or genitals or waste dispensing organs. He never needs to eat for sustanince but he eats flesh for pleasure. His singular goal is the orgasim of fullfilled desires. He sleeps in blankets of posion ivy, deadly mushrooms, fungus and mildew, corpses and thick moss. He can only speak to me, only I can understand him even if I am repulsed by what he does.
~ Anonymous
My personal demon: I never got to say goodbye before she died.
~ Anonymous
My personal demon is INDEPENDENCE, which is masked by partnership, which is mired in fear, which is drowned in numbness. Sometimes alcohol, sometimes media, sometimes busy-ness.
And that, I think, is the nature of demons. Multi-layered, and clever about keeping the surface nice and tidy.
~ Anonymous
picture any kind of monster. picture him raping you. fast forward twenty five years and a pieced-together spirit. a good spirit embedded with permanent monster tatters. damn those tatters. my angels have labored, without rest, without witness, to build a protective fortress against those toxic remnants. the result? a new, internally constructed demon. not an external monster, but a tower of invulnerability. my demon is my inability to be vulnerable when there is safety all around. fear is sometimes greater than love. demon fear. fucking demon.
~ Anonymous
That I'm not good enough at anything, and I'll be an assistant/waitress for the rest of my life. I've gotten offers to photograph different things but I get so scared I make up excuses or price things to where I know I won't get the job.
That might fall under self-doubt.
Also, that movies have wrecked love. I fear that I won't stay in love forever, but might not ever say anything for fear that no one would treat me as kind as matt does. (I think it stems from my long series of abusive relationships) And it took so long to find a relationship that wasn't abusive that I fear I may never find another if it wasn't to work out. This goes along with bad judgment in relationships.
~ Anonymous
Today my personal demon is Facebook. It requires too much information to look on, it is too rigid in its format, and it requires that I have a password that meets its 'security' standards which means that I never remember it. Then I ask myself who are these people at facebook that want so much personal information and why should I trust them not to abuse the data that they collect.
~ Anonymous
I have a couple but I guess my biggest one is the fear of not really being able to love, that I don't have the capacity to love enough.
~ Catherine
My personal demon is obsessive thoughts . . . . it's hard for me to predict what will trigger a series of obsessive thoughts or what will stop them. Grrrr . . . . . Exercising to exhaustion sometimes helps!
~ Christine
My own personal demon is envy. There's an expression: "compare and despair." I fight that all the time.
~ Donna
a pack of phantom dogs that are after me in the woods
~ Doreen
Fear of rejection
~ Edmund
fear of my greatest potential.
~ Elisha
Isolation. I like to roll around in it, even when it verges on loneliness. There's something beautiful about that kind of isolation, even though it's intensely painful sometimes. I don't know if that makes sense.
~ Elizabeth
My personal demon is not being able to get back to sleep when my mind is racing at 4:30 in the morning.
~ Elizabeth
My personal demon is my struggle to be honest with myself. I tend to get caught up in what I think my expectations of myself and others "should" be, rather than what I actually in my heart believe. That is, I tend to disown my heart, perhaps in a vain effort to protect it, and ultimately I spend much of my time muddling about in the dark trying to find it. I end up often backtracking in my ideals and beliefs because I am so good at convincing myself that someone else's status quo is my status quo.
~ Heather
Seriously though, I feel myself becoming more average every day, and I'm not doing a thing to stop it.
~ Henry
My interior critic... overzealous to say the least.
~ Jen
My personal demon is my hair.
~ Jillian
The personal demon that is most apparent to me right now is my indulgence in nostalgia. Ordinary, maybe, but sometimes it feels almost crippling to have a past. Not that I want to lose the past, in fact, I am rather obsessive in trying to order it, hold on to it, REMEMBER it, but then, sometimes, when I do face it, it just boggles me with that delicious pain. I know there are lots of reasons why we experience nostalgia, but it never seems less mysterious no matter what I read about it. Lately, the nostalgia has been coming to me like waves of split personality - in that I recognize my own memories of past events with real immediacy, and yet at the same time I don't believe they ever happened to me. I have been so many people, and they don't all go together... I wouldn't give it up, this nostalgia fetish I have, but it is very hard on me.
~ Jim
The sea is my demon. I am in love with it. I leave my family for long periods of time to go to it. A visual picture would be the cheesy Beowulf movie that came out recently when the hero dies at the end and the Angelina Jolie demon comes out of the water as a temptress to see if she can get her claws in his successor. That's the picture I get in my mind of the ocean. I can't get enough of it. I am a beach bum and live two blocks away from the Atlantic Ocean now in Virginia Beach. I want to smell it, taste it, feel it, see it, hear it. It has ruined two of my marriages. It hurts my family to see me go on long deployments. Yes, I am locked up in a six year enlistment and I hate leaving my family. But I have re-enlisted twice in order to keep being out at sea. It is my blessing and my curse.
~ Jonathon
Burning bridges before they are built.
~ Justin
Off the cuff, I would say that my personal demon is that I'll never be great at anything. This concept of greatness and striving for greatness both drives and haunts my soul. It could be the result of being a "Jack of all trades" personality where all my life I've been able to do fairly well in no matter what I've tried to do, but I've never been great.
So the darkness within me constantly forces me to look at my work, my life, my existence and ask how can I improve? While it may not seem tremendously demonic, having an inner drive that you're not sure that you can ever satisfy is nerve racking.
Furthermore, as the demon begins to take shape in this sort of soulless blackness, it grows to recruit self-doubt, over analytical reflection, constant self-evaluation, and endless desire. The irony is that I am supremely (over)confident and sure of myself, but only to the world outside of me. It's this weird balance of overcompensation and too much self-reflection.
Again, this isn't as descriptive as I would hope, nor is it saying exactly what I think (describing a demon is very difficult), but it is what it is
in a short response to a surprising question.
~ Justin
Sensitivity: Good or bad I cannot help but get emotional.
~ Karen
My personal demon is regret. Not of what I have done, but what I failed to do.
~ Kate
My personal demon is not living up to my true potential. Whatever the hell that is.
~ Kayt
I fear it really is all in our genes. Sometimes I worry that no matter how much much I've learned from my REAL mother, and no matter how hard I try, I will wind up to be a horrible person just like the people whose genes I carry.
~ Maya
I am such a peaceful, harmless person but when I see ants marching in a line, I want to sweep them away with one quick stroke. There is something about their orderliness that disturbs me. I guess my personal demon is that I secretly despise control and order in the natural world but in my own life- I have to control everything.
~ Michelle
There will be no jokes... I am hell-afraid of that my son Darwin is getting hurt/ going wrong. I had never thought of until the son came. Life is different now. Art comes after...
- Mija
Self doubts are the big personal demon, also plate techtonics and asteroids, but those I guess for less demons than worries about things over which I have no control.
~ Natalie
TIME is my biggest personal demon, You can never really save or capture it despite what you think.
~ Pete
My personal demon is self-doubt.
~ Peter
And, if it's any use to you, my personal demon is the greener grass on the other side of the fence...
~ Rebecca
super-stereotypical scottish attitude towards money - every time i spend even a little money, i feel guilty/ashamed/somewhat of a failure/that i know better.
turning into a "philosopher" every time i get into a serious discussion (i.e., i'm super-aggressive, blunt, and hypercritical). it's some wierd hyper-macho balls-to-the-wall disciplinary norm that i hate but somehow managed to pick up (and now I can't seem to unlearn the habit).
~ Robin
Failure, giving in to giving up
~ Ryan
Time. I don't understand it, and I don't like it.
~ Smith
Mediocrity: That what I've done and judge to be good or great, outside myself is average or lacking. Sad, lonely demon go away!
~ Susan
Regret.
~ Sylvia
"More so!" The first full sentence I spoke while in my highchair, according to my family, was "I want some more!" ... The second sentence I spoke when in the back of the car was "I can't see much!" ... But part of the demon that drives me requires, i.e., gives me no quarter, my Being competitive. I've thought more about "it" more and more this weekend and will get back to you sometime this week.
You have reinfected me with this question! ... i can tell you about my demon in so-called discursive language, but describing it is something else. I will just have to give you some representative, or misrepresentative ... anecdotes, or antidotes.... Have sent out more calls for the rcid-engl position. ... Our house has sprung yet another leak, this time, the commode on one floor, that was reinstalled by a plumber, has begun to leak, as they say, "black water"! so the Servpro people, who are still working on the house, are coming with their chemicals to kill the stuff before it does whatever it does. ... there are demons and then there are demons. ... i just tell you that i believe this house is haunted! i kid you now. only the gods know what happened here.
infectuous images throughout the above. most of my writings use this imagery. bacteria and viruses and immune systems. when i read avital ronell, i found more of the same. in fact, it was a former grad student who found the two of us using the same imagery to drive what wanted to be said. ... have you read Pearson's (sp) -viroid life-? good book on nietzsche and deleuze.
~ Victor
my personal demon is my memory.....reminding me of the dirt i have done!
~ Waseem
fear of inadequacy.
~ Yon
My personal demon: I have been plagued by the idea that "nobody likes me
and nobody will like me no matter how hard I will try to please people". I
have this idea in my mind: people (including my family, friends) think I
am weird, aimless while I thought I know who I am and what I'm doing. Of
course, occasionally I am wandering, drifting.
Does this make sense?
~ Xiaoli