For the record, I’m not your parent, counselor, attorney, father confessor, shrink, or any other authority on your life. All I do is tell you entertaining stories. Please bear that in mind. Or be careful about baring your mind. Or both. You have been warned.
I’mma also state for the record that I don’t think these two things are mutually exclusive. (Demons and mental health—in case that wasn’t clear.) However, as a consumer of both modern mental health care as well as more metaphysical practices, I will state emphatically that if you need help, GET IT. There’s no shame and there should be no stigma associated with getting professional mental or spiritual help of any kind. I believe everyone should, whether they think they need it or not.
Especially if they don’t think they need it. Both kinds.
My own journey along the path toward stability and happiness has been decades in the making. Angry is such an inadequate adjective to describe my teens and twenties… I attribute much of my personal progress to my lovely warrior-queen. Her long-suffering patience has been saintly. In many ways, we have grown up together in the decades of our marriage. Tempus fugit.
Neurologically-oriented nutrition and counseling also played a key part. Dr. William J. Walsh has some amazing lectures on the subject on YouTube. His book Nutrient Power is the foundation of my daily supplement, medication, and nutritional regime. When I’ve got the proper amount of sleep and nutrients, it becomes much, much easier to generate the creativity necessary to work on my stories for you.
Speaking of creativity, my primary goal in every story I tell, demons included, is to make the many worlds we share better for everyone. My creed is simple:
Better stories make better people.
Demons, angels, servitors, archons, avatars, and other spirits feature prominently in my fiction. Personally, I see their influence everywhere. If you don’t, that’s cool. We can imagine together that they do in fiction.
Their direct action is often a casual agency in my stories. Sometimes, they’re even the heroic agent. Because I don’t subscribe to an exclusionary, binary philosophy (in my fiction) about the nature of such beings, I often use the terms interchangeably. For me, there’s no functional difference between a demon or an angel, nor any intrinsic nature of good or evil. I don’t believe life is simple or binary most of the time.
Beings are not good or evil.
Only their intentions and actions are.
In fiction as in life, we characters exist inside complexity that we strive to make sense of. We often do this by trying to simplify complicated order into obvious order through religion, philosophy, and other tautologies. As we are in life, fictional characters deploy story to understand the past, endure the present, and predict the future.
The quality and utility of the stories we tell ourselves are the measure of our mental health.
I suppose this is a long-winded disclaimer to say, “Don’t take my fiction too seriously.” If you find a good life lesson in my stories, remember that when you act on it, you’re making it your own. At that point, it’s no longer my story. It’s yours.
What story are you telling yourself?
