My Tentacle Monster

I don’t know about the rest of you, but the days I’m really down, I can visualize what is wrong without necessarily having the words for it. Today, I’m going to try to describe it.

It’s like these long, shadowy tentacles breaking through my chest. It feels like they’re breaking the bones in my chest and extending far beyond me. That’s the feeling I get right before I start to cry. When I’m feeling irritable, they come out again. I can practically see them grabbing the person or thing I’m angry at in their clutches. It feels like a dark force is overpowering me. I know that, a majority of time, my response to certain situations is overblown. I tell myself to stop yelling, stop screaming but it’s as if I’ve taken a backseat in my own head.

I don’t always know when the tentacle monster will rear his winding arms. It could be over some minor comment or sometimes he’s with me from the moment I wake up; I know those days in particular are going to be hard. Just when I think I’ve kept him at away for good, (two or three weeks will pass with no sign of him) he’ll burst right through me again, back with a vengeance. He might stay with me for days or weeks after that.

I try to explain all this to family and some friends but a lot of the time, I don’t feel understood. They counter that I could get out of these emotional slumps with a good bit of willpower. I try to get rid of this beast whenever I feel him. Trust me, I do not want to feel this way. However, most of the time, it feels like he’s using one tentacle to hold me underwater. I feel apathetic, exhausted and the anger just keeps swelling to no avail.

The last few days, I’ve had some bad run-ins with this shadowy figure but I keep going anyway. After all, he can’t hold me under forever.