It is highly tied up with my drug addiction, but I don’t think that’s what the demon symbolized. I’ve had the demon within me long before I first started experimenting with drugs. Just that before the drug, it was merely a part of my personality, not a dissociated creature with its own personality.
Almost at the same time as puberty hit, I remember being attracted to the thought of darkness and evil. I was bullied by almost everyone in school from grade 6 to grade 11–I had no friends, not even the nerds liked me–so it’s hard to say whether this fixation on darkness and evil stemmed from my anger and hatred of my peers or it would have flowered up regardless of what I went through.
But anyway, I eventual started self-diagnosing and came up with this image of myself as split into 5 personalities. I reasoned that the only thing preventing this from being an actual case of dissociative disorder was the fact that I was aware of them all (I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a fetish for twistedness and a sort of sick pride in thinking of myself in such ways). They were: the intellect (the part of me that’s likes coming up with theories and philosophies), the artist (the part of me that likes to draw and write poetry and fiction), the hopeless romantic (the part of me that’s a sucker for love and romance), the angel (the part of me that wants to do good for others), and the demon (the sick, twisted part of me that loves the macabre and gothic). I thought of the intellect as the dominant part of me that kept all the others in line, but the demon always had some special something about him that seemed to deserve special attention.
Then I started doing drugs and that’s when the shit hit the fan. Over the months, I started slowly losing touch with reality, getting confused about whether the demon was still just a part of my personality or an actual dissociated spirit that had either possessed me or haunted me. I started forgetting how the idea of the demon originated–that I had originally come up with it as a symbol of a side of my personality.
I can’t say that I ever literally experienced a demonic attack or an evil presence in my midst, but I have experienced thoughts that I could not control–thoughts that seemed to intrude into my mind that I could not shove out or deny–and these would often be extremely dark, paranoid, and terrifying thoughts. ← this is the way of drugs.
Just to be clear, I don’t experience it this way, I’ve just created a story in my mind, a narrative. I used to believe it, or at least I was very confused about how real it was, and of course when I was full-on tripping, I could very easily believe it was real, but when I was sober I was more confused than delusional. Now-a-days, however, I know it’s just a narrative I tell myself–it isn’t real for me anymore, even when I’m high.
Well, it continues to be a symbol of myself, or a side to myself.
Well, it’s definitely I kind ego dystonic but the question of why I do it is less clear–although I’ve come up with some interest bits of self-analysis to explain to myself why. I think for the longest time I used the demon imagery as a defense mechanism against something even more terrifying–namely, pure ungrounded fear. It was kind of interesting when I came up with this interpretation because it meant that the demon was actually protecting me rather than harming me. I actually held on to the demon to have some way of explaining or conceptualizing what was happening to me in the intoxicated moments of sheer terror–it may not have been rational but at least it was something. I think the mind needs some kind of explanation in order to feel just a bit more secure in moments of terror because a source of terror that is understood is more manageable than a source or terror that you just don’t understand.