The monster under the bed, the monster in the closet. At one point or another during childhood, we all imagined a monster, and we would wait for our parents to come and scare it away. Now, imagine that same monster is within you. I never grew up thinking I had a monster under my bed or in my closet. The monster was always in me. I created a version of myself that scared me from fully allowing myself to be ME! Do we ever think about how we create a monster version of ourselves, whose only purpose is to scare away the strong and confident aspects of ourselves? We typically think that by allowing that monster to show up when we are around people, it will scare them away to the point where they will not want to get to know us.
I never liked who I was, and for that reason, I pushed people away my whole life.
    The monster is crazy good at building up the ego and creating doubt, fear, and overwhelm. I didn’t know it at the time, but that monster I had created kept me from stepping into the strong, confident, loving, and smart person that I am today. When I created it, (we will call the monster IT), I wanted it to scare away the strong version of myself. IT started to help me create weakness within myself, to keep me from fully stepping into my core self. The doubt would creep in, and it would keep me from being strong in a situation that I needed to be strong for, or allowing me to show up as my full self. The monster made me shy, and kept me hiding in the corner for so many years of my life. I was scared to come out because I thought the monster was scary. I was afraid to shine and to be the amazing person that deep down I knew myself to be. It is ironic if you think about it: I was scared of myself, and at the same time I was scaring myself.
            For so many years in my life I battled the idea of being my own self and what that even looked like to me. I always showed up how the people in my life needed me to show up. That didn’t leave room for me to show up as myself, that version of myself got lost. The more I kept living my life hiding, the more the emptiness took over me. It felt as if something was missing and the more I kept looking for it in my external world the more I started to feel empty. As if something was missing and I didn’t know what it was. Until someone very special to me told me it was all within me. All my life all I wanted to do was allow myself to be me and not to hide. I didn’t realize what this person meant till I heard the words. I had to love myself unconditionally, especially for all the parts I deem to be imperfect. I had to see how every part of me is perfect in its own imperfect way. I needed to accept myself and allow all of me to come out or else that empty feeling was only going to become stronger as it once did when I was 23. I remember how I felt empty, lost, and this pain took over my whole body. This pain was different than any other type of pain I had felt before. It hurt to breathe, feeling my heart beat was followed by tremendous amounts of pain. I couldn’t even explain this type of pain. I couldn’t find the words for it. All I knew is that I wanted it to stop and I was only able to find one way to make it all go away at the time, and that was to commit suicide. To take my own life. The pain I felt was all because I had to hide parts of me that I deemed inappropriate and unloved from within, because I had felt that once and I was not about to allow myself to feel that again. That is why I needed to find a way to fill that void, that empty feeling from within me. I couldn’t keep feeding the monster fear anymore and I had to find a way to win the war that I created.
For so many years, the monster scared me and kept me from doing so many things in my life. One of those things was leaving my husband and becoming a single mom of three children. At the age of 26, I went against what IT was scaring me away from, and finally decided to leave my husband. That still didn’t make the monster go away. For years after that, I felt as if I was playing tug of war with IT. That war was inside me the whole time. At times, I wanted to give up, because it felt like IT was winning. In those moments, I would get a burst of strength from my guides that would help to keep me going and to fight more. I had a war to win. I never gave up, because I wanted IT to be gone. The war did get brutal and bloody at times, and yet that never stopped me. IT loved to create doubt when it came to three important things about me: showing up as my full self, trusting my actions no matter what, and unconditionally loving myself. My whole life I never addressed those three topics internally, because I always tried to fill them up from my external world. IT always scared me away from looking internally, and made me think that I was never going to be able to find them from within me. For so many years, I kept seeking what I needed from my external world, but it never filled me up. That is when I forced myself to change, and went into the biggest battle I’d experienced in my whole life. I started to see the finish line and feel the victory of the biggest win I would achieve to date. That is when I went face to face with the monster, because there could only be one winner, and I was not about to let IT win this war.
      That is when I took out all my tools–and I mean all my best and strongest tools– to help me win this war. My strategies changed. I pulled back and hid while I came up with a new game plan using the new tools that I now have. As we go through life we accumulate many tools that we tend to suppress into our subconscious mind. It all comes down to trusting oneself to know that no matter what, the tools are within ourselves. I’ve realized over the years that no one teaches us that we have what it takes to create the life we want. We are the creators of our lives, and now it is time for me to create the life I want to be living. I will say, it isn’t easy! But just knowing the beautiful outcome from this journey will make it worth it. I choose to look at the obstacles in my journey in a new light, which will look different from one person to another. In my experience, choosing to see what the obstacles are uncovering in me is what works for me. What I mean by that is, when the obstacle gets tough, I will look internally and fully step into whatever strengths it is allowing me to embody. That strategy on its own has helped me to win this war and to see the light within me. It is all from within!