BLOG 255 - My Monster

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you" 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Last year I was freelancing for a company. The company was great. Everything a start up should be, fresh, funky, hopeful, innovative, pushing the boundaries, creating something awesome.

But my contact there… well he was a monster.

And to make things worse….He was a monster who hated me.

No matter what I did… he rubbished it. Then in early this year we had an almighty blow out…. Well he did.  He went for it with such force I had no ability to defend. He attacked the core of my being with such relish it was outstanding. I was paralysed in the moment. I couldn't understand how anyone could be so cruel, so unfair and how anyone could enjoy attacking someone who posed them no threat and wished them no ill. At the time it was the worse thing that had ever happened to me, my sense of self was rocked and I even contemplated suicide.

Well, time has moved on… I don’t work for that company anymore.

But sometimes on the train I see him.

I usually make myself small and discreet and believe me when he disembarks – the breath I let out contains the relief of nations.

I often talk about this man to my friends.  I am a processor by nature and for me to let things go, I really do need to understand why they happened. If for no other reason than to protect myself from them ever happening again. There have been days when I am as stuck in the moment as I was on that cold dark night when the attack took place. I process it over and over again, looking for a reason, anything really, just so I may get some closure on what truly was the worst experience of my life.

But then something odd happened.

I was on the train, making myself small and discreet…. And I over heard him talking to someone.

He didn't sound like the big bad wolf at all. He sounded like a person. A person who was a little overwhelmed by life not quite working out the way he hoped, but hopeful that one day it would .

This got me thinking.

Being unable to deal with someone causes us to dislike them. And it is so easy to cast the object of our dislike as a monster.

We say to ourselves:

“I AM NOT YOU”

“I AM NOTHING LIKE YOU”

And as comforting as that may be…

It’s a lie.

We all at core are the same.

Our differences are superficial.

We all, each and every one of us carry the same capacity for good and evil.

When we… as I did with this man… my personal monster… continually look for differences between us; we hold ourselves fast in the ‘unable to deal’.

We have to let that go.

I now know that when I remembered the night of that mans vitriol I looked outside of humanity for a reason why anyone could act as he did.

We all think that our secret pain our secret joy makes us unique.  We all think this make us better than the people we cannot deal with, with people we dislike, the people who have hurt us.

But really, as the conversation I overheard revealed: we are all the same.

We all want to be happy.

We all want to be safe.

We all want to be valued.

And by knowing that, maybe we all know that deep down inside… there are no monsters.

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