This morning on the tube I started to smile.

It wasn’t anything to do with the fact that I actually had room to breathe for once, nor the rather attractive blue eyed “red” who was sitting a few seats from where I was standing. It wasn’t even the cute nerdy looking guy diligently updating his “things to do today” list, written in jolly bright blue letters like stationery for the attention-deficit disordered. It wasn’t even because I’d just about manage to wield power over my hair for once this morning. None of that.

I was smiling because I had realised something profound about origins. I suddenly knew why exactly I’ve been going wrong as of late - since I left university, why my life in London seems so out of sync. Terribly clever thing the brain - you ask it a question without realising, it mulls if over without you knowing, and then, in the middle of bathing or walking or during a dinner party in close and quiet company - EUREKA! - an answer to a question you never knew you asked presents itself, and for a brief moment you fit completely with the universe and each and every poor prior attempt at addressing your malaise is answered at once. Everything. It’s sort of like the finalé of a TV series where every loose end is tied up, often as a dangling thread of the same tapestry, and the heart-stoppingly “Oh my God” scene of terror it ultimately depicts. Most of my friends will know of my obscure look on the stages of my life as seasons in a TV series. Coincidentally, this revelation has come at the end of a typical 7 year run.

I realised this morning that it isn’t about where I need to go, but about where I’ve been. Because things haven’t been going wrong since I left university.

They started going wrong before.

And I caused that.

You see, a few months after I arrived in St Andrews, I got cut in two. I did that, consciously, willingly. This is not some trite human metaphor about getting your heart broken. I used to think I’d had my heart broken by experts, and in a way I was right. We’re all masters of our own torture in a way that no one else could ever be quite as efficiently. This is because a great deal of love is arbitrary, not the feeling but the object. We all have the same capacity for love - deep, near-endless reservoirs of devotion and virtue that really do bring out the best and the worst in us. Little pieces of God’s power I used to call them - the ability to feel every emotion, in pure potency, and all at once. These reservoirs we can pour into anyone else’s eyes, and with it blind hope, unquestioned trust and the belief in the goodness of this person, because you can see it looking back at you now. There’s no one person for any of us. The person we choose, and we do choose, revolves predominantly about the human sentimentality regarding time. But more on that… well, more on that another time.

So, I cut myself in two. The severed part I no longer wanted was put in a box, along with everything else I chose not to carry about myself. I didn’t realise it at first, but this wasn’t a box. It was a cage, and the items in this cage - the severed remains of myself, the thoughts I no longer wanted, the hurt and pain I chose not to feel - this all gave flesh to an entirely different identity. It became a personal demon.

Let’s give this demon a name. It’s wrong to reveal such a thing’s real identity, because a demon becomes manifest when you call it by its name. The giving and knowing of names are, after all, evidently very powerful things. But I don’t see that this makes much difference anymore. This demon has been swelling in my head since the end of the 20th century - perhaps longer, and causes just as much harm as a bulging tumour in my subconscious mind than it can as a manifest aspect. The cycles come faster now than they’ve ever come, and they cut deeper. I just know why now. I know where they come from. I know what to call this condition, this malice, this sickness. For now, let’s call this demon Teragh. It even sounds sufficiently old school pagany/Celtic to be credible.

Into Teragh was cast all the things I hated about myself - the jealousy, the envy, the lust, the furious burning rage, spite, malice, selfishness, pettiness and doubt. And most potent of all, self hatred. He became an unwanted child, locked in the basement, blamed for everything that went wrong, whether it was his fault or not. This left me, Ben, able to strive to become something better than who I was, to become the person I wanted to be, stripped of the things that I believed held me back. This act was not conscious at first. It was accidental, and it was cumulative. A byproduct of one simple statement of self identity.

Of course, It was never going to work.

For a time everything went well. But soon enough, as is my undoing, I began to neglect the cage. The monster would get out every now and then - increasingly more often than not, until it could be chased through my synapses, held down and dragged back to his prison. Whenever he gets out he goes straight for what will hurt his captor most. He lashes out with his filthy talons at his friends, chases meaningless encounters with unfulfilling souls to pollute the vessel that imprisons him, sows little seeds of doomed affection for people impossible for his jailer to obtain so that he might escape again in the distraction of inevitable hurt when it fails. He likes it when I feel alone and hopeless. Teragh may look like nothing more than an awkward teenage boy, but he is just as clever as the systems that bind him, only far more dangerous. He lacks morals. He is hate unrestrained. He is the siphon for every disappointment, every failed relationship, ever bereavement and every noted injustice. He squats in his own filth, pisses into that pure reservoir of faith and trust you’re meant to pour into others’ eyes and, sometimes, screams until his jailer is left quite dizzy with the sounds echoing around the hollow prison. He is scarred, malevolent, destructive and restless.

And he is in my head.

Unnoticed and forgotten, he has been eating me alive from the inside out. Through his rages and tantrums he took away vital supports that I didn’t realise had suffered irreparable structural damage, and collapsed when I later tried to lean on them. It’s only when you’re not under the demon’s thrall you realise how powerful he is. How pervasive and destructive - how he completely robs you of hope, logic, reason and your ability to feel even the most available emotions in response to things.

He is not the source of my destructive, chaotic duality but the manifestation of it, with everyday Ben, naturally, selflessly cast as the epitome of all that is good. He is the aggravator of seeds already sewn, the unholy ghost for primordial voices, whispering their chants and curses from the deepest darkness. He is the twisted champion of abandoned memories, screaming to be heard, to have their suffering finally addressed and not shoved into another dark place where they can be ignored until they are forgotten.

When this occurred to me this morning, as I said, I felt the urge to smile. It wasn’t because I’d solved anything that was wrong, but simply that I’d recognised where all this wrongness comes from. It was because I felt peace with that knowledge, for the first time in a long time. I have been hiding in the light because I’m too scared to step into the darkness, but there is no ground to be made in hiding in one extreme over another. I cannot kill this monster, because it is part of me - it is an unacknowledged aspect of my identity I have already ignored for too long. I have to integrate it into my life, always keep an eye on it, and not make anymore excuses for the behaviour of this child locked in the basement for years.

Know thyself. This is another tidy little axiom I say a lot to those few close friends I have left. Know thyself, because only then can you make peace with yourself, and exist as well as you can in the world around you. In a way, I feel like a charlatan, that I offered up to myself this most fundamental piece of self knowledge only this morning, years too late, with so much unnecessary damage already done.