The Malignant Spirits of the Addicted Mind

They come from the unexplored cave of the unconsciousness, emotional turmoil born out of the lava pit of the unexpected, unleashed into your far too convenient and comfortable world of self-contentment. Those foul hellions are sent with one purpose: to haunt you, to morph into suffering, tragedy, fear, anger and the seed of corruption: change. You run away to escape the chaos of this experience, only to find out that the stress, the umbilical cord of tension, cannot be cut, and will pull you back into the cesspool of psychological agony.

Then along comes a notorious savior: the deceitful succubus, with her whip of obsession, whispering sweet promises of blissful escape, through a tunnel of forgetfulness, away from the chaos, luring you to what seems the perfect order of ecstasy and fulfilled desire. Only then do you find out that no paradise lies on the other side, and the tunnel transitions into a loop of reinforcement, keeping you stuck in the same nightmarish cycle with ever-increasing desperation, and ever-decreasing relief.

Is there a way out? The grasp of the whip is tight, and the charms of the succubus are hard to resist, but once you figure out that all the shimmer and shine are actually chaos and stress incarnate, you can embrace the tension of this instrument of chaos and, knowing you cannot really fight this supernatural creature, you just endure, allowing the corruption to spread and threaten to overwhelm you, but holding on to the idea that this grotesque being may have manipulated you, but never truly owns your very core.

Sooner or later, the succubus will grow bored and tired of seducing you, and you will have to face what you had been trying to escape all your life: your true antagonists. These hellions threaten to lay waste to your mental landscape, but now you know that they are no true enemies, as they are simply the harbingers of change, who have come to urge you to get out of your self-imposed prison of comfort and convenience, and to embrace chaos, to grow into the great human being you are destined to become. You bow politely, and gladly let yourself be taken away, on the endless voyage towards the magnificent unknown.

The flame of hope can never be extinguished unless you surrender her to

the long, cold night of forgetfulness.

? 2020 Marcel van Delft