WHEN THE ENEMY SPEAKS FROM WITHIN
One night you get up from bed. You don’t want to go to the bathroom and you don’t feel thirsty either. One night you wake up (or you’ve been trying to sleep for a long time) and you look at yourself in the mirror. Something has changed or, maybe nothing has evolved as you expected. Beyond vanity or approval desire, you feel that the gears of your life do not work as the same rhythm as the others; there is something that provokes friction in you. The pieces don’t fit. The beat doesn’t flow with harmony. It is the enemy that whisper from inside. Who is it? What does that unknown but unbearably persistent voice wants? When the enemy speaks from the inside there is nothing that can satisfy it. Everything seems to it a lost project; it doesn’t want
to go on but doesn’t want to stay put. Suddenly, you place yourself in front the stairs, that leads you to that, that you were expecting for so long and that finally! Is going to happen. However, as you climb up the steps, the weight of your legs turns intolerable and you believe that you won’t be able to make any other attempt to go on. It has nothing to do with physical weakness, neither fear, nor insecurity; just the opposite, it is precisely the conviction, the certainty that nothing will change, that, for some reason you can’t understand that is not for you. Discouragement can be something painful. Discouragement makes you yield in a discrete way until it comes a moment when every activity is paralyzed, every idea.
When the enemy speaks to you from the inside the other voices don’t count. The other voices only provide noise. It doesn’t matter if they bring you sweet words or biting critics because when this antagonist voice is the one that expresses itself, the compliment or the exogenous insult does not bother you. Like if a stone thrown to a lake wouldn’t produce a single wave in the water. At this point you begin to think that this foe is truly your friend. The only one who understands the vulgarity of life and the frailty of your existence. One begins to think that no one will ever understand the language, the secret code you have with it. Loneliness in this relationship is the rule.
I have already revealed the identity of that enemy when I spoke about discouragement but it is something more because if the discouragement is a common experience, the feeling I’m trying to describe moves in a personal dimension, individual and non-transferable. It consists in a self-sabotage desire that each of us recreates depending on our own imagination. If discouragement was a turtle, it would be an empowered thoroughbred. So it has to do with something more.
These are some of the symptoms that may be felt: Loss of the sleeping capacity followed by a wealth of dreams that the next morning you are so tired to remember; slowing of personal time, walking by inertia with sketched steps; intolerance to trivialities, decrease of the senses; sentimental lethargy, very, very little manifestations of emotional instability; moderated scorn towards yourself; anxiety, Among others. Metaphors that can illustrate this feeling: You find yourself in a small grey room with little decoration and you realize that, in the lower split of the opposite door, the most beautiful colors you have ever seen appear; but you can only contemplate the reflection. You don’t know how to cross that door. You take part in a conversation in which h people speaks half in your own language, half in another one you haven’t heard before. At this point you can hear the voice of that being in within. You go walking on the street and suddenly you realize that you know all the people wandering. Everyone rushes to greet you massively and you, feeling overwhelmed, take a side alley to run away
from all of them to stay alone, but, when you are, you feel scared.
All this is quite relative. As I said, each of us lives these experiences in a personal way. It sounds complicated but this feeling is complicated too. I called it enemy because behind its mask of revelation, of epiphany, there hides the worst of the terrorists, the destructor of foundations. It makes you unable to see beauty and blurs achievements. It evolves and keeps you in a state of imminent danger which sometimes provokes anxiety. If sleeping turns into a difficulty, waking up becomes an aggression and there is nothing of this world or the other one that can relieve you. But it ends up being so persuasive… Despite that, let’s be careful because it is not a total liar And let’s be especially careful because when the enemy has spoken, you don’t come back to bed alone.