We spend so much of our lives running from the shadows we cast. We tidy our edges, soften our sharpness, and learn to smile in a way that puts others at ease. We are taught to hide the parts of ourselves that are messy, chaotic, or difficult to name.
But what happens when you stop running and finally turn to face what’s been following you all along?
The thing in the glass
At first, you don’t recognize it. It’s a flicker in your peripheral vision — a glimpse of a snarl where your smile should be. It’s the rush of a dark thought that feels too primal to claim as your own.
We’re conditioned to fear this reflection, to call it a monster and lock it away. We plaster over the cracks where it tries to surface, hoping it will suffocate in the silence.
An unlikely courtship
But you can’t ignore a thing that is, at its core, a part of you.
So, I started to write about mine. I gave it a name, a form, a story. I let it speak its piece on the page. I gave it sharp teeth and a broken heart and a reason for its rage. And in the process of giving it a voice, a strange thing happened. The fear began to dissolve. The monster in the mirror wasn’t something to be slain; it was something to be understood.
The acceptance
This is the secret power of creation. It allows for a conversation with the self that is too terrifying to have in the quiet of your own mind.
My fiction became the sacred space where my darkest impulses could be examined without judgment. The character driven by vengeance, the one hollowed out by grief, the one who delights in chaos… they are all fractured pieces of a whole. By giving them a story, I wasn’t glorifying the darkness. I was integrating it.
I fell in love with the monster not for its teeth, but for its wounds. Not for its rage, but for its passion. I fell in love with the raw, unfiltered truth of it. It was the part of me that refused to be polished into something palatable. It was my strength, my resilience, my will to survive, dressed in a costume I had been taught to fear.
The monster in the mirror was never the enemy.
It was the part of me that was finally, and irrevocably, free.
— Montse
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