Take care of your devils, dear friends. Make sure their fangs stay jagged and their horns pointy. File their barbed tails till they cut like razors and angle-grind those cloven hooves to bisulcated perfection. Make certain your Lucifers stay in top demonic shape. Keep them close to you and within reach because the demise of a good devil will leave a larger vacuum in your life than the loss of a dear friend.
Great devils inspire you. They give you energy and ambition. You will want to spite them, you will want to challenge them. They keep you up at night, while you are plotting your next move. You will spend more time thinking about them than you do your friends. You will improve yourself so you can be worthy of facing them head-on.
And one day, if you work hard enough, your day of reckoning will come, but it might not be what you wanted.
For when you look at the devil – really look – you should see yourself reflected in its ghastly glow. It is you. It is always you. Your shadow will not reveal a triumphant warrior; it will show a flailing figure filled with guilt and shame. Guilt. Shame. What worse punishment for a human than to feel that the whole time? And our devils make us feel it, that is why they qualify as devils. The accompanying anger and hatred are a mask. The sense of ‘justice’ we want is an easier and nobler sensation to deal with than the guilt and shame we feel when we realise that whatever the devil did to us, we allowed it. We didn’t say ‘no.’ We did not know how.
That instinctive sense of inferiority and defeat is the real source of our discomfort. It signals to us that we are not survival-worthy and the resulting torment sculpts a devil to your design. The more powerful the devil, the easier it is to validate your submission.
We are not supposed to survive this long and this easily. When the horned and fanged creatures threatening our existential angst were sabre-toothed tigers, our reaction to an immediate physical threat was instinctive: you either died or you lived. Now we have to endure the torment of knowing that we could have or should have died and we didn’t.
Complicated sublimations
Over time, our limbic system has had to adjust to being an increasingly sophisticated social ape when we imbue it with complicated sublimations like humiliation, self-reproach, religion and hate.
It is fitting that Satan will come to us in the form of those closest to us. It is the narcissistic colleague, the abusive parent or the psychopath as boss who holds the most power over us; sabre-toothed tigers have nothing on those motherfuckers. Make no mistake, you will have bad people in your life, evil even – and the worst might be your family, but your real mortification is in your reaction to them. The trick (which I have not yet mastered) is to not fill the void left by your degradation with a devil bigger than the gap itself.
If you make it your mission to destroy devils, you might be stuck wrestling shadows. Perhaps a better way is to learn to co-exist and negotiate better psychological boundaries. The abusers, the narcs, the megalomaniacs – they are all compensating for their deep-seated issues with inferiority. It will be devastating for you when you realise that.
Psychopaths are people too, (shamepies, mama) – but it does not mean you have to live with them.
You don’t have to make their shame your problem. Don’t put yourself under pressure to forgive them either; that is an unnecessary distraction; you don’t need it. These absolute states can become unhelpful. You might confuse ‘peace’ with ‘emptiness’ and rob yourself of true healing.
Life is difficult. That is why devils are so easy. They fill an important space in our lives. Hate and resentment can be very productive. They can give meaning and vitality, and fuel great achievement. That’s better than guilt and shame.
Thus heed this warning, when deciding to slay the devil, do it very kindly. Duel with compassion and empathy. Do not even enter the fray if you feel anger, resentment or a need for vengeance.
Defenceless, vulnerable old woman
You will find that your demon, at the very time you need it to be that pointy, snarling beast, presents itself as a defenceless, vulnerable old woman and if you come at it charging with sharpened weapons you will be instead impaled on the horns you put on it yourself.
Before you kill the devil, think carefully – you might wish you never had.
[Image: Nicky ❤️🌿🐞🌿❤️ from Pixabay]
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