“Demons”

November 3rd, 2013

I’ve locked away my demons

I’ve thrown away the key

In the night I hear their voices

I feel their eyes on me

I pray to God protect me

Surround me with your light

I’m beginning to feel alone now

Don’t let me give up this fight

Will others love me if I let them see 

The darkness kept inside of me?

Throughout my life and struggles, peoples common suggestion for peace is prayer. I come from a pretty religious family–I went to Sunday school growing up and got more involved throughout my youth, but unfortunately, prayer has never helped with the chaos of my mind. You see the problem is, is that a lot of people often times don’t believe in mental illness…but they believe in God….meaning they believe in demons.

Demons have made my life darker than it has to be.

Around middle school, when my mental stuff was beginning to rev up, I was going to church every Wednesday. I honestly loved church, I loved to worship and how it made me feel. The more and more I went, the more I heard that there was no such thing as mental illness, it was just demons in your head. This left me feeling helpless. Because now I’m thinking well fuck, how am I ever going to get over this if I pray all the time and I go to church, yet nothing is changing….my shit was actually getting worse.

Now let me back up a little and clarify that I definitely still believe in God and I have, more times than not, chose to pray when things got bad. This isn’t a story on how I hate God now because he didn’t fix me. This is a story about the difference between mental illness and demons…because unfortunately, I have experienced both.

In 2013, during the time I wrote the above poem, I was beginning to black out during severe episodes, and during those blackouts, I would get violent or people would say I seemed possessed. (I had had small instances in the past of demonic feelings when I was trying to pray. It felt like I was drowning.) This was a time of feeling scared because I didn’t know what I was going to do next or what was going to trigger me. I was off my medication at this time so I was extremely vulnerable too.

I had a situation where my boyfriend and I had gotten into a fight and when he woke up, I was standing in the corner watching him sleep. He said it looked like I was going to kill him and he locked me outside of his bedroom. Now when I try to explain the blackouts as best I can, it’s more like a dream. This is where The Other Shelby explanation came into play. It honestly felt like someone else was doing the motions and I was kind of just watching from the sidelines.