winning the battles, losing the war

Sometimes you think the worst thing about the demon is that he isn't even trying that hard. He doesn't have to, because he just keeps the drops of acid dripping onto your brain... he doesn't need a flood of it, he doesn't need it to be strong, or new. He just needs to keep it steady. Like some lousy old comedian endlessly recycling the same bad jokes, only changing the names here and there in a token effort to keep up with the times.

They don't really like you, you know. That's one of his greatest hits; that's how he usually begins his act. They see you for what you really are and they're just waiting for an out. You wanted so hard to impress them, and all you really did was bore them. And that guy you wanted to impress so badly, trying to be so charming? You're not charming, you're just a fool. Those smiles they gave you? That wasn't happiness; that was pity. The most you will ever get from ANYONE is for them to feel sorry for you -- and that is more than you deserve.

The demon never allows anyone else's kind words or deeds to reach you without picking them apart and reassembling them into some cariacture, a mocking version of itself wearing a mask that it barely makes any effort to keep on. And the demon never allows anything you do or say to ever pass your lips or your fingers without throwing every wall it can in front of it. You will never get any words past its barriers that it will let you get away with thinking they're good enough. You will never do anything that will be worth the effort or worthy of who you're doing it for.

You have no right, he tells you over and over again. They've got their own battles to fight, you know. They've got their own problems, their own unhealed wounds, their own invisible weights that they're dragging with them from one day into another. So what the FUCK makes you think you have any right to add to that? What in the whole goddamned motherfucking WORLD makes you think that they need to be dealing with YOUR shit? You think you can ever be anything but a burden and a drain to them, to your family, to anyone?

And you tell ME I'm the one making the bad jokes here?

He tells you it would be so much easier to run away again, to shut back the tiny bit of the door to the outside world that you've just opened up for yourself again after sleeping so long in the numb dark. It was a mistake, he says, you weren't ready -- and pretend otherwise all you want, but you know you never will be. You weren't ready before, you aren't now. Crawl back into your bed and your bottle of valium where you belong. If you're too much of a coward to stop being a complete burden in the only way you possibly can, then you can at least do THAT much, if you have any self-respect left. If you care for THEM at all.

And you know that he's right about that one thing: it is easier to hide. Easier to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. You cannot fuck up anything that you don't even try to do. You can't fuck up any friendship that you don't even have, you can't fuck up anything more that you don't even reach for. You can't trail your shit anywhere outside your door if you never open it. You can't keep failing with your life if you stop trying to live.

It's the one thing the demon knows that he is always absolutely right about and always will be. It's his greatest weapon, so he always saves it for the big finish.

And wouldn't that be great, really? he says in his kind voice, for once, the voice he uses at the end of everything else, the one that really twists the knife in. You would be doing them AND yourself a kindness. It would be a gift to yourself as much as to them. Just stop fighting. It's that easy. It really is.

And you know, you know you can handle any one of those fights one at a time. The demon has thrown all these things at you a hundred thousand times in a hundred thousand ways. And one by one you are equal to them. One by one you can fight them back. One by one you can take them and know them for what they are. One by one, every single day, every day good and bad, you can survive and keep fighting the battles.

The demon doesn't need to win any of those battles. Some days he does, some days he doesn't. He'll still be standing there at the end of every battle, no matter how many of them he loses.

All he needs to do to win is keep fighting the war.