I'm the Monster, it's me
Reflections on stupid sh*t I did as a kid
Chapter 1 of the Artist’s Way asks us to write down a horror story from our past. Tell about the monsters who convinced you that you had no talent and would never amount to anything. Especially if you believed them.
In that moment, I couldn’t think of any particular people who have pushed me down creatively, but one experience stood out as being the event that stopped me from ever wanting to build anything. It may seem silly, but it haunts me to this day, and I think I need to get it off my chest, for whatever reason we share these shameful episodes from our childhood.
So, here we go.
I was in prep. First year of primary school; meeting new friends and learning to be on the playground. How to smile and respond and interact with people without any family around. Learning who we are when we’re with people on our level.
At the time, my mum was renovating our house. Building an extra room on the back. So we lived in a bit of a work site.
One day, my friends and I were talking about making a cubby house. What a great idea! We could build a little house on the school grounds, just for us. I think I was the ring-leader—giving everyone jobs and instructing them to bring in materials the next day to get started. The other girls seemed keen though. They said they’d bring a hammer and some nails and of course I had plenty of wood lying around at my house.
I went home and excitedly told Mum about my plan. I don’t know how well she listened, but I guess she thought it was a learning opportunity or something. Or maybe she thought it was a school project. Maybe I presented it that way, I don’t know. But she said I could take some old wood she had torn off the back of the house and helped me choose a few bits.
So, picture this: Four or five pieces of decrepit timber, rotting brown exposed under the peeling, greenish paint, some with rusty nails hammered over so they didn’t stick out. It was all hurriedly laid out for me in a sorry pile on the ground behind the back door before I was hustled off to bed.
I was nervous, but I’d made an agreement with my friends, so I bravely carried the bundle the ten minute walk to school through the suburban streets. I arrived early, and as I entered the grounds, I suddenly began to feel nervous.
I quickly realised there were several things wrong with my plan:
You can’t make a cubby house out of a few pieces of worn out timber
We didn’t have permission to take over a part of the school grounds for our project
I looked like a complete lunatic and no one should ever see me or know that I’d actually taken the plan seriously
I put the wood on the front stoop of the classroom and ran away as fast as I could to the playground. I found my friends and didn’t even have to ask to know that they hadn’t brought any tools. I didn’t say what I’d done.
When the music played to call all the students to line up outside the classroom, I didn’t run like usual. I loped over as slowly as I could and joined the back of the line. I saw the pile there with fire burning in my cheeks and tears pricking the backs of my eyes. The teacher eyed the wood suspiciously and said something like, “There must be some builders here today. Don’t touch this, it could be dangerous.”
I nodded and walked past the pile into the classroom. When we came out at recess, the wood was sticking up out of a rubbish bin. In those days, bins were stout metal cylinders so the lid was half off to allow for the protrusion.
Nobody ever found out that I was the one who brought the wood, but now you know. I’m the Monster. It’s me.
I’m still squirming with embarrassment as I write this and I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring myself to hit publish.
Now, I’m not sure that there’s a direct causal link between this event and who I am today and why I’m struggling creatively. We’re always looking for connections between our childhood trauma and our current personalities and predicaments, but who really knows? Could this contribute to the fact that I’m resistant to building anything? To buying property? To owning pretty much anything? To pursuing leadership positions? Or to believing that I’m capable of making good decisions? This one event has always seemed like proof in the back of my mind that I can’t possibly be smart, no matter what else happens across my lifetime.
But anyway, the theory is that telling the story should break its power, which is why I’ve brought it out of the hand-written pages of my Artist’s Way notebook and put it here.
Maybe I can even laugh about it one day. It is entirely ridiculous of course.
Thing is, when I first wrote this out in my exercise book the other day, I asked myself if I could go back to that little girl and hold her and tell her it’s OK. That she’s not stupid or reckless and she should keep trying to build things, even if that one plan wasn’t a good one.
And I just couldn’t. I couldn’t believe that. I let her go on thinking she’d made the biggest mistake anyone has ever made.
Because she brought some wood to school.
Over to you:
Do you have monsters in your past that might be blocking your creativity?
Or have you done such insanely stupid things that you can’t forgive yourself and comfort your inner child?
Maybe you should put it in a notebook, but if you want to share in the comments, I’d love to hear about it.
Putting these buttons here so Substack doesn’t bug me when I hit send.
I love this so much (sorry, I'm probably not supposed to) because a) I imagine everyone has those hidden stories of shame that are much bigger than many would think they are (I know I do), and b) you convey this so beautifully and eloquently (and that's genuine). I'm going to decline sharing my stories because I couldn't take the raw edge off with words, but they exist and and still powerfully influential
It is strange, isn't it - how important some things seem to be, both at the time and perhaps at periodic moments later when the memory suddenly pops back. Even though our grown up rational self tells us it's silly. Except it's not silly. Not really. All those moments do not go away, even if they are fragmented.
In neuroscience terms, what we have to do is unravel or prune that bundle of connections and then rewire it - which is of course easier said than done. One option is to meditatively - or however one chooses to do it, using some kind of symbol - take that memory and store it carefully and lovingly and reverently in an internal memory palace. And when we do it we say something like 'you still mean something to me, which is why I'm putting you here in this safe place. But you're not allowed to influence me anymore.' Or something along those lines. The brain does indeed respond to symbols and ritual gestures like this.
Of course again it's easier said than done.
I have a memory of something similar about being intentionally punished/traumatised for being more intelligent than anyone else in my childhood peer group. It told me the best way to survive was to act the part of a B-grade student, which I pretty much did for the rest of my school-years. It was only about, I don't know, 12 or so years later I guess when I was able to learn all by myself with no one watching that my inner genius felt safe to be allowed out again. Obviously I still have the residues of all of that, but there is a part of me that will always be an angry rebel and refuse to be suppressed. It's a case of channelling and focusing that, I guess.
I'd best not actually describe any of these awful memories or it'll be upsetting for all concerned.
Don't know if any of the above helps - but I would say definitely writing it down and sharing it helps. It's a kind of ritual purging, perhaps. I also think humans are very attuned to the psychology of ritual. And we can use that in a positive way.