We all have great enemies in life. There will always be difficult tasks to complete and monsters to face. It’s a natural part of everyone’s life, and learning to deal with them makes us stronger (as long as it doesn’t kill us). Most of the time, we always triumph in the end like the heroes in books. The rule is, every monster can be slain, right? Isn’t every problem going to pass in time? They’re supposed to. My problem is that the monster is inside me.

Imagine, you’re sitting in a big auditorium. There’s a few hundred people there, and they’re all listening to your teacher give a speech. His voice drones on like the buzz of a bee. It’s pretty boring, and you notice you have an itch. Besides the presenter, everything is silent. Too silent. You’re listening, when all of a sudden you think: What if I stood up and insulted him at the top of my lungs? Yeah. and I could kick over that trash can and storm out. Suddenly all you want is to disturb the peace, and it’s taking all your focus and self control just to stay put. You tense up and start sweating, wondering if any moment you could snap and explode. And you have to wait… minute… by minute... soon every second feels like an hour. When you finally remember the speech you have to listen, you have no idea what he’s said. Since you can’t really catch up, you’re alone with your thoughts, boiling under the surface like a balloon being over-inflated.

This is what happens to me. I don’t remember when it started, but sometime I just found myself having self-control issues. It typically happens when there’s silence or only one person talking. To me, it feels too still. It’s like the scene in every horror movie ever when everything is fine but the suspense is mounting because you know the killer is about to spring from the closet very violently and loudly. When things seem to still or ordered, I get an impulse stand up and cause chaos. I want more than anything to stand up, interrupt everything, and scream profanity at everyone in charge.

I end up in a struggle between this desire and how much I care about fitting in. The truth is, I care A LOT what other people think of me. I know it’d be shattered if everyone saw me as mentally ill.

The only other thing preventing me from disturbing the peace is that I would be reprimanded. Whenever I would mess up when I was little, I was used to getting yelled at and scolded. I don’t know about everyone else, but I HATE getting scolded. It makes me feel terrible. Especially when people ask the infamous question: “Why?”. I hate this question especially. I hate it because it’s a trap. You can’t give an honest answer, something along the lines of “Because I hold my wants to a higher value” because that makes you seem like a selfish jerk. You can’t say you don’t know because they’ll proceed to ask why then you did whatever it was you did. The only way out is to act extremely remorseful and pray for forgiveness.

This fear is so strong, when I just think about acting out I get really tense. I feel this war raging inside me and I hate it. I lose sense of what’s being said around me because it takes all my energy to control myself.

This is a terrible monster to deal with, not only because it happens intensely and often, but because I have no end in sight. This conflict of interests only festers inside of me, not getting better or worse. I think there are only two possible endings to this long war. Either I carry this burden until I die, or the tension builds inside of me until I burst like a time bomb. I can only try to stick to the first and hope for diffusal cord, something that will ease the pressure before I can’t take it anymore.