Feeding Your Inner Monsters: an un-self help book

'Monsters' are a denial of the real world, of all that organic complexity we really live in. Instead, we play pretend: defining a world of straight lines, bright colors, crips backgrounds and simple stories and then whine when the world is other than we wanted. It's got to stop! We need to feed our inner monsters, we need the strength that they can give us. Happy monsters, happy life! This book is focused on your making choices; not simply acting on the choices handed (imposed) on you. A cookbook is an orderly array of tools and ingredients, which still won’t result in what you expected quite often. Specific, detailed blueprints for a building are legendary for resulting in something that really wasn’t quite what was expected. So a book like this, which examines the hazy interface between two vaguely defined concepts-the ‘self’ and ‘social structures’-is going to be a lot less specific than a cookbook or blueprints. Consider this book as a ancient map exploring the areas marked ‘here be monsters’. The goal of this book, phrased dramatically is: “when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” (Friedrich Nietzsche) Within the Abyss have been exiled the unwanted, socially undesirable parts of yourself. Those parts of you, that really are ‘you’, don’t go away when blithely bidden to depart, casually dismissed as noise. They sit in corners, angry. So we become afraid of the dark, afraid of the quiet, afraid of our thoughts. Taught to fear, taught not to look, we spend too much of our lives running from shadows. Shadows that are powerful, and can carry us if we just let them. The sentence before the ‘abyss’ quote above is: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” (Friedrich Nietzsche) This book doesn’t want to fight with your monsters; it wants you to be friends with them. Fighting monsters, you become a fractured personality, shards of broken glass clicking against each other. You divide yourself into a false ‘good’ and a fearful ‘evil’, setup by society to do battle over nothing, forever. What’s benn exiled into the abyss is yourself: you must embrace yourself, ALL of yourself, to be whole. Tell yourself of the darkness within. . .