06/06/2025: The Monsters and Boxes in My Mind

I feel a little anxious today. It’s like I can’t get a full lungful of air even though I’m just sitting here. 

This state of mind strangles my productivity and makes me focus on the negatives in my life: unspoken things and passive aggressive conversations, all my worries and fears that eat at me in the back of my mind all day and when I go to sleep at night. I picture my brain and think about what monsters might lurk in the shadows that I don’t even know about, and it scares me. 

I had a conversation recently about hypnotherapy, and I agreed that it was kind of a terrifying notion that we all might have dark things lurking beneath the surface that are just waiting to be revealed. I was also presented with the idea of us compartmentalizing our traumas, and things we don’t want to worry about now, into a series of mental boxes: that inevitable deadline before an important decision has to be made that you never wanted to make in the first place, and all those truths that would strain your relationships if you voiced your true feelings aloud, to name a couple. 

We constantly suppress our demons instead of facing them. We always choose peace over honesty. And so the cycle continues as those monsters multiply and those boxes pile up and collect dust. And while we deny their presence, those monsters grow uglier and those boxes become too full to cram anything else inside. But we’ll tell ourselves that it’s fine, that we have it all under control. Until we don’t. 

When the monsters come out and the boxes break under that pressure, it’s a million times worse than whatever nightmare we pictured when we initially suppressed and retaped them. It’s a vicious cycle that we’ve all been guilty of at one time or another, even if it was something small and harmless like forgetting - or not wanting to - call someone, or putting off a task that you’ve been dreading for months like a simple household chore, all the while those little harmless-looking dust bunnies are traipsing around in your mind around a couple of old and worn shoe boxes and not much else. 

Either way, monsters big and small have a way of being silent antagonizers, making us second guess everything and think negative thoughts about ourselves and who we are as a person. There are countless reasons we feel tired, not good enough, and broken. And there are a million monsters of varying shapes and sizes that feed on these thoughts and feelings, and a varying number of accompanying boxes of different sizes - thank God they’re all the same shape; who knows what other troubles that would cause? - for us to fill to the brim and stack for the monsters to hide behind. But at some point our storage might flood and disintegrate that cardboard, or the monsters might nibble holes in the bottoms. 

The one thing that’s certain is that the unconfronted monsters lurking behind will always be there, watching and waiting with eyes aglow in those dark recesses.