Meet Each Demon As You Go (Inspiration in Despair)

At least, it’s quite an undertaking. It’s generally harder to create something than to destroy something, and that art is a particular labor of creation: creation from the disorganized substances of the artist’s life, hopes, memories, beliefs. Numerous little deities of sorrow, passion, and fury people the halls of our imaginations, and they lay hands onto whatever we create, to be marked by them for good or ill.

But art seems to be especially hard right now. Nearly every artist I know is presently staring down horrors that shadow the horizon enough to freeze every delicate, artistic inner space into ice. I routinely hear my writer friends remark at how hard it is to stay focused on penning stories about romance, hope, or victory as we collectively watch fascism emerge in the streets of our cities and towns. To find purpose in creation when every few months bring omens of climate change and global ruin. To take joy in the mere act of creation as oppression gathers strength, destroying lives and orphaning children.

A new era is heralded in alarm bells, an era for tiny gods to pale against the rising ash, and for demons to take to the wind. Demons who stand in the way of creation, bearing messages of fire and filling the air with smoke. We create now against the promise of despair they represent, and in hordes we are asking:

How do we face it? How do we keep going, with our little creations raised to the darkening skies, offerings to gods that no longer seem to be listening?

Ten Thousand Demons On the Path

I’ve often come back to this metaphor—writing every day is like walking a pathway, beset on all sides by ten thousand demons. They are demons of doubt, fear, perfectionism, fatigue, uncertainty, embarrassment. They can also be demons of trauma. Of illness, outrage, injury, and absolute despair.

I wish I could supply some methodical trick for exorcising these demons. Some mental exercise, affirmation, or meditation to send the problem away, so we can set the grieving parts of ourselves aside and simply brave on.

Unfortunately, I know of no such magic. Demons don’t like being ignored.

I can share something about how I’ve come to relate to the demons on my path. Maybe, if there is any commonality to their shapes, I can help you relate differently to yours.

The Offering to the Demon of Death

I’m maybe blessed in that I learned to love writing early, and found purpose in it at a young age. Blessed not just because I still love writing, but in that it may have saved me. Not just my spirits but my actual life—and may still be working my salvation, quietly, intently, wherever the little gods live.

Memories of depression go back to my earliest years of school, as do memories of ostracism and abuse. I wrote about this a little more for a series by Open Ink Press called Gender in Romance, in The Story of the Bad Ugly Monster. Being a trans kid is hard, though I suspect I may have been depressive even without that.

I learned depression was not random, a mere brain malfunction, but rather a ravenous demon that dogged my tail. Hundreds of scraps fell at my heels to feed it—isolation, harassment, hatred from peers and strangers. Wounds that piled up so quickly my very body seemed to be made of them.

One thing was certain: I wanted to die. I do not mean I was suicidal—that’s maybe the strange part. Not that the possibility never came to mind, but a different urgency was mounting in the gestalt of my wounds.

I prayed for the world to end. I wanted death to come, naturally and mercifully, and release me from this world so I could move on to the next. A devout teenage Christian, I fantasized about being raptured, literally carried to salvation by divine forces. I recall looking out the window during school and imagining angels tearing strips out of the sky, coming to ferry me and countless others to something better. I read everything I could get my hands on about Heaven, about the end times, about transfiguration and a new, painless life eternal. Beyond male and female, beyond bodies made of wounds.

The only thing at that time that seemed to tie me to this world was my writing. If a purifying end was not to come yet, maybe this was why I was here. By seventeen, I had resolved to just face it: the sour truth was (or seemed to be) that I would never live the kind of life my peers were preparing for. I’d never be desired, be married or have children, have a conventional and profitable career. I was too queer, too odd, too disabled, too full of the debris of broken things. This was why I’d craved the end that was probably not coming.

But I loved to write. Maybe that counted for something. Maybe the imaginary incarnations of me that haunted my daydreams could take up beautiful lives in my place. They could have what I likely wouldn’t, and that would be my gift. Maybe somewhere, someday, those incarnations would have value to someone else, and it would give purpose to this life that otherwise seemed to have gone so off course.

I’m honestly embarrassed to confess this now. One reason is that I’m well acquainted with the advice that authors shouldn’t make our books our babies, shouldn’t make our writing our whole lives—because, as they say, if we’re not enough without writing, we’re not enough with it.

And yet this is exactly what I did. This was the offering I had raised up to my desire for a soft death.

The other reason I’m embarrassed is because I abandoned it all almost immediately.

The Offering to the Demon of Despair

I think most artists may agree that while art isn’t their whole being, it’s nonetheless invaluable. There’s no shame in embedding oneself in this creative path, even if it’s a little bit desperately.

I think most artists also know what it’s like to lose hope.

My dream of purpose disintegrated in the teeth of emerging adulthood, and the carnivorous truth that was becoming impossible to ignore—I was so depressed I didn’t know how to function anymore. I was also trans all the way down to my atoms, and facing a life of pretending to be male that I absolutely could not endure.

I’m not quite sure how I managed not to drop out of school, but I suspect it may have been mere lack of options—there’s something to be said for giving over to the power of momentum. Everything that came after was much harder. I devoured information about transsexuality, medical transition, gender identity—much as I once had about the end times—but believed this would all be something that’d live only inside me, like my deific incarnations. More secret potential life, growing and growing and never being seen.

I also spent three years as a shut-in, and then hurtled practically as soon as possible into an abusive relationship with a much older man. In some ways it was that true, deep heartbreak—the kind that does not permit you numbness, that taught me to believe I was profoundly ugly and undesirable—that finally started waking me up.

And all this time, there was no writing.

It was like having lost an entire dimension of my life. A dimension I’d counted on to bear the full weight of my hopes. Without it, I simply fell down, no other purpose to give me lines, shape, a definition. I had stopped believing in my branching tree of private gods and the vicarious lives I’d once wanted so fiercely for them.

A few things came from my heartbreak and the aftermath of painful awareness. One was seeing myself anew. I’d grown from a cautious but fairly innocent gender-ambiguous trans girl to what appeared to be an awkward freak, with a fresh pile of trauma and absolutely no skin. I fell in love again almost immediately, helplessly, with exactly the wrong person, in exactly the wrong circumstances. This was all agitated by gender dysphoria so sharp it drew blood, and a small town that had already lost patience with my alienating inability to be a man. I was angry all the time. I was afraid I would never be me again, if I had ever existed. I was only just learning the craft of carving a self out of the raw, streaming dark.

The next truth that gelled was that I had to figure out how to make this transgender thing work, which led to me finally coming out. And another decision was made.

I wanted my writing back.

This was probably scarier than coming out. Both acts were about reclaiming territory, but gender and its battlefields were familiar ground. Trying to be a writer again—as an adult this time, with a goal, a vision, a hope—was a path much less well charted.

The Offering to the Demon of Doubt

It certainly wasn’t that I didn’t have stories to write. In a way, that’s what clinched things. I had been dreaming of and telling stories all along, spinning lifetimes for my deities. I just hadn’t been writing them down.

The justification I gave myself was that if I was going to be storytelling anyway, I may as well at least give putting them in readable form a try again. Thus was the offering raised to the forces of doubt, so that I could pass this gate.

But beyond that gate lay a new world of trials, because the hard part was only beginning. In the service of my trusty perfectionism, I chased every advantage conceivable—I bought and read dozens of books about writing technique and what editors wanted. I sought out writing buddies. I tried a low-pressure project to start with. I looked for writing groups and critique partners. I joined forums. I read blogs. I sent pages to friends and took every fragment of feedback like it was medicine.

Writing again was exhilarating—but at times unspeakably painful. I’d get stuck, like a bug in honey, in a single sticky sentence, and it would multiply in size like something out of Wonderland, until it became almost impossible to think past. Agony saturated me over everything from my word count per hour to the genres I gravitated toward, and made writing a path that bloodied my feet even as I hungered for speed on it. Writing advice was the oracle I’d turn to for answers, but the answers only tended to foster more pain. Was I using the word “seem” too much? Was I doing enough to avoid a “saggy middle”? Was I hitting the right pinch points—did I even really know what a pinch point was?

Demons emerged in grandiose numbers, with powers beyond reckoning. There were the kinds of demons you’d expect, that writing advice is usually designed to address—the demon of “will I be good enough?” The demons of fear of weak prose, lukewarm narrative, stale characters. Demons of of unyielding perfectionism. Demons that bit me every time a writing buddy didn’t adore that one line I’d loved, or the scene I’d worked so hard on didn’t evoke the response I’d secretly hoped. Demons of worry that I was being arrogant, asking for too much.

But greater demons walk the shadows. The demon of my obsession with death came back in a new form—this time not a longing for release, but an all-consuming fear that death was coming. Soon. And it was coming to punish me for trying again.

I’ve always been susceptible to anxiety, but writing seemed to amp that up to a new stratospheric height. Health anxiety flared to debilitating proportion, every ache and pain interpreted as an omen of death by disease. I couldn’t stop thinking about cancer. Every kind of cancer. Images would knife through my head of strangers killing me in the night, on my in-broad-daylight walk to work. Considering I was That One Transsexual in a small conservative town, this was not a baseless fear—and obsessive worry is an old friend. But those obsessions were ballooning up to eclipse every light in the sky. The stars were dark behind everything that threatened to shoot me from the path. Hundreds of random death scenarios, accidents and illnesses and lighting strikes of cruelty.

Something was growing plain: I had never let go of the hope that my writing would be the ship that would at last carry me to shore. Now that I was facing the hope again, it was unbearable. The hope was a demon too, so mighty that no power on earth seemed capable of thwarting it. The hope was necessarily entwined with a fear, as hopes always are: that if I failed this time, all would have been for naught. Every striving breath, the wounds on my shredded heart, the mixed pining for and terror of death.

I have learned at least two great lessons about demons. In this struggle I was beginning to learn the first.

A demon is just a god in crisis.

The Offering to the Demon of Fear

My personal gods had never left. They are the demons. And this is what finally made it click that the demons I fought every day had never been trying to stop me.

They had been sounding an alarm. In Christian tradition, demons are angels who have abandoned grace. But in many other cultural traditions, what might be translated as demons in English are not evil beings in any sense, merely another kind of consciousness. Perhaps even tricksters, beings set on revealing truth through a silken outer layer of illusion. Even angels are foremost divine messengers.

To see my demons as anything other than malicious first appeared impossible, but that was merely the illusion, the crêpe-thin wrapping paper of lie. Their real purpose was always to help me understand what my suffering was. The legion of demons were only angry gods, angry for me, roaring the unheard paean of my needs.

So they had gathered here at the renewal of my self-possession, calling out, “We speak on behalf of your wounds, which have gone long untended.”

So long had they gone untended. This showed me why the path so bloodied my feet—I needed to walk it in a way that would not hurt me further. The real work had never been to defeat or ignore my demons, but to receive their messages.

This meant leaning toward fear. The fear of failure, fear of mediocrity. The fear of vulnerability, loss, and death. Writing again makes me feel catastrophically vulnerable. Of course it does. I am still growing back my skin, learning how to have boundaries, how to take care of the me that has been abused, rejected, terrified, beaten, blamed, and humiliated.

I spent years wanting to die, for heaven’s sake. No well-meant writing advice, self-confidence trick, or handy saying was going to cure that. Of course it hurt, so much, to face all that on the proving ground of the page. Just as it hurt to treat my wounds as barriers, flaws to be papered over in the name of a homogenous, unmarkedly productive calm.

What slowly began transforming that pain into relief was letting it speak on the page itself, and also in my life. To the people around me, by prioritizing myself where I had once put myself last. To my work, by letting my needs inform how I wrote and the way the process worked best for me, no matter what the advice said. And to myself, by finally feeling the hurt of all those wounds.

Feeling it, allowing that pain its own space, soothes the demons. There is no magical antidote for pain. It kept seeming logical to reason with fear, to argue with it about reality. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t listened to its urgings. I’d already been growing more mindful of my health, taking more precautions with my safety, and had plenty of experience spotting danger. One thinks that should have shut it up—but it didn’t. The fear is always looking for a new threat to identify, and if all the threats are resolved, it will conjure theoretical threats for me to worry about it.

Let’s be fair to fear. This is probably because I’ve spent most of my life having very little control over my safety. So now my angry demon of fear is using its every power to give me that control. My fear works overtime for me, and it probably always will. It’s trying to make up for decades of wounds.

I am still afraid, all the time. Including of sudden death, as well as all the more usual fears. But that fear is not an enemy. It’s not irrational, merely shaping something out of nothing. It’s only telling me, over and over, how vulnerable I truly am.

And vulnerability is the path.

The Offering to the Demon of Desperation

So demons ride forth on waves of fire, glittering in the darkened pall of our planet’s uncertain future. If we understand them as revealing, rather than wicked, their purpose becomes clear—to illuminate our wounds.

As I listen to other artists talk about how hard it is to create when injustice and devastation loom, three wounds strike me as the most widely shared: powerlessness, panic, and silence.

What’s hard about tending these wounds is that they are collective. They spread beyond the scope of personal life change and individual wellness; they are the grievances of generations, of societies in torturous flux. Thus we stand before a demon of powerlessness. What can singular artists do to change the trajectory of history? What can ordinary citizens do against mass evils like fascist uprising, colonial oppression, and the jaws of environmental catastrophe?

The answer to these questions are much more than merely nothing, but the political role of artists goes somewhat beyond the scope of this post, and probably any single blog post (though you can count on me coming back to it).

I would however like to speak of the other two wounds—panic and silence. Artists are if anything specially positioned to help tend to them. Sculpting a vision of hope and possibility is what we do. It’s a big reason most of us write, draw, paint, compose, sing. Because even if only as small lights feeding a greater flame, we say, I can do this to soothe the panic. I can do this to fill the silence. Our demons and their stern messages are not burdens, but the way forward. This leads me to the second big lesson I have learned about demons:

This was always the task.

Our myriad gods have always had cause for anger. Oppression and injustice aren’t new—which can be a frustrating thing to be reminded of. I know it’s not new. I know it personally, with the mapwork of wounds to prove it. That human history is full of injustice does not lessen the flagrance of the wounds suffered right now by the billions, growing in severity and number as we breathe.

But in a certain light, this truth comforts me as little else does. This was always the task. Art is hard because life is hard. We have much to accomplish. My journey with my own demons has served as practice for meeting demons even greater and more aggrieved, demons championing wounds that span the generations. Just as I bring my own trauma to the page, so do I with the trauma of the earth. This may be with solemnity, condemnation, sorrow, or it may be with sweetness. Promises bright and weightless, the dream of gods finally at peace.

The Offering to the Demon of Silence

Of this I am sure: I want to be alive now more than ever before.

My demons have helped me reconcile with this world. I want to be in its filth, its uncertainty, its smoke and diamond-bright embers. And I want to change it. I want every angry divine force within me to become a power for good, their voices heard now like waves crashing to cover the abused land. I will not leave it now to fend for itself. I will not leave others like me. I will not leave the demons in their injured cries, to split the sky and go unheard.

This is the offering I raise to the powers of silence, the demons of which perhaps are the hardest for me to face. These wounds always seems to swallow me back up again. The wounds of hiding my self, concealing the many stories of my truth. Concealment came close to killing me, and still its strength can be suffocating. Concealment offers its illusory armor from vulnerability, the wound that incites fear, but silence is not mending. It never mended me.

The silence is both my wound and that of the ten thousand, the infinite lives crushed under the weight of their voicelessness. The weight you yourself may bear, as injury afflicts your voice with pain. So this offering is also to you, whoever you are, that I will do my best to help you speak. Hopefully with my art, but more than that: anyone reading this post who needs someone to hear them, I am listening. You can reach out to me personally, if you think it would help, and I will do my best to answer.

I offer my words to fill the silence. I offer my hands to lessen the powerlessness. I offer to share in the power that has been softly mending me.

And I will do what the demon of silence, in its wrath, has shown me I must do. I will heed the message it bears from beyond the horizon, calling breathlessly: