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I’ve tried to pretend my mood was better than it truly was today. Sometimes it works to act as if. Act as if you’re happy. Act as if you’re not overwhelmed. Act as if you’re more confident than you are. I’ve found that often if I act ‘as if’ that I feel braver, happier, and it becomes true with positive energy put into it. But today, it just hasn’t worked.

I’ve sat at the computer and got no pages. It’s an Edward scene and that usually writes very fast, and is a lot of fun, but today the page sits empty. I’ve chased my tail, and in the end not even caught that. What’s wrong? Nightmares.

I almost never have bad dreams, but this will be two nights in one week. It’s a record as an adult. I woke at 4:30AM from a dream where I was drowning. I’ve almost drowned for real two, three times, and that includes one diving mishap. I know that water represents emotion. I know that I feel like I’m drowning in it, them. I was raised that my emotions were not that important. Mine were certainly not as important as my grandmother’s. It’s left me with an ability to close down my emotions and survive in situations that most people wouldn’t. It’s a great survival skill. But she’s dead now, and she can’t tell me I don’t feel what I feel, or that somehow its wrong to feel it. I don’t think there was a single thing I ever wanted or desired that she didn’t tell me was wrong, or selfish. That goes from playing Dungeons & Dragons, to acting, to sex, to men, to marriage, to joining any religion. She disapproved of all of it, not for religious grounds. The only religion I was raised with was angry at God. She didn’t want to share me not even with God. Biggest fight we ever had was when I joined the Episcopal church in college. I don’t know what she would have thought of me becoming Wiccan. By the time I found my calling of faith, I no longer needed her approval.

I know the nightmares aren’t just about my grandmother, but they are about that old training that my emotions are somehow bad. The woman who raised me, called me evil to my face, a monster. This when I was still in high school, and early college. I won the fights though, by saying this, “Fine, I’m the monster.” Then I would go do whatever it is that she so did not want me to do. I can’t tell you how many fights I won, by saying that, my being the monster, being evil, if that’s what it took to step outside that door, and do the things I knew I wanted to do. What I wouldn’t realize for years was that words have power, a lot of power. By me saying, “I was the monster.” “I was evil.” I internalized that message. Not only were my emotions bad. Not only was it wrong for me to want anything separate from her from a husband, to faith in God, but it made me evil. It made me a monster.

Now I write about a main character that is slowly losing her humanity, slowly becoming one of the monsters, at the same time that she’s discovering that there are a lot of different ways to be monstrous. Anita worries that she is the monster, because people keep telling her she is, and she buys into it. But in the end its not fangs, or claws, or super human strength that makes you a monster. Sometimes, its just words spoken too often, too loudly, by the first person you ever loved wholly and completely. The first person that was my life and my safety, told me I was a monster. Where do you put that? What box do you hide that in? Me, I write it out. I take the demons out of the dark and drag them kicking, screaming, biting, into the light. I throw them onto the page and exorcise them with the very words that created them in the first place.