I Have The Right To Confront My Demons

I have the right to be sad, to feel bad about myself when something isn’t fair or when something isn’t right. I keep this right because if I don’t, I put a lot of pressure on myself and become depressed. These are my demons and they are actually not that evil at all. They ask me to understand them and tell me that what I feel is life and that the earth is the paradise I want to make of it myself.

You and I have demons

Imagine someone telling you that you can be sad, that it’s normal, and that it’s even necessary from time to time. Imagine you are this person, accepting your own feelings and letting the whole world know that you didn’t have a good day today, simply because they can’t all be good.

Indeed, in our contemporary world, it seems that we are obliged to feel good about ourselves and avoid suffering. Suffering is portrayed as something abnormal, negative and far removed from a life that can be seen as fulfilling.

In fact, it seems that feeling bad does not correspond to what is seen in society as a healthy and happy life. Similarly, a person is often looked at strangely when he says that he is feeling bad but that he is doing well and this makes one try to figure out what is wrong with this person that he can say such a strange thing.

We have tricked ourselves into demanding undue optimism from our lives. We never learned the value of suffering.

Both my demons and yours fight against the tide of positive statements and motivational posters that force them to take shelter, to hide behind a paper wall and feed on oppression. The sad and the negative also deserve a place in our lives. If they don’t get this, they will explode and suffocate us. Today we don’t even have the right to frown when something bothers us. Enough of constantly yielding to the tyranny and dictatorship of over-optimism!

I don’t want to be forced to be happy all the time. My sadness is the only thing that makes me appreciate my happiness and pleasure. Plus, it lets me know when things aren’t going well and when I need to worry. If I were never sad, I wouldn’t know how to appreciate it when I’m not sad.  When you look at it that way, happiness is more selfish and makes me think everything is going well, leaving me less time to react well when things aren’t going well at all.

I don’t want to be a pessimistic or melancholy person, nor blame myself for calling my demons depressing. I simply live my life and accept that my days have different nuances, as many nuances as the number of circumstances I find myself in on a daily basis.

So defending my demons gives me two options: accept myself or reject myself. When I don’t accept that my demons exist, they will make me suffer forever trying to avoid them or I will get frustrated with the fact that my demons always find me and hug me more and more, until I eventually run out of breath. That is not good.

That’s why I rather try to make room for them and welcome them with open arms from time to time so that they can ease my mind. My demons are sincere when I let them in and they let me know it’s worth fighting because it’s worth being happy.

The motto ‘you have to feel good about yourself to be happy’ is not my motto. I have a strong preference for the idea that sadness and happiness live side by side and need each other and that it is healthier to live with the thought that ‘I will feel good about myself, even if I sometimes feel bad’. The way I react to my demons depends on the extent to which I open myself to a natural part of life.

When my demons are confronted with justifications for almost everything, they will continue to yell at me, until finally they are able to hurt my soul and make me feel like I will never find fulfillment because I am unable to to live the moment or because from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep I don’t feel the need to laugh.

For this reason alone, I reserve the right to use my grief whenever I want. My demons refuse to fall into the trap that makes them grow. My demons love me and don’t really try to harm me at all. They simply give me a hug every now and then, without me bothering to remind them that I’m alive.