The monster inside me awakens when I cannot control it. It finds the most unbearable time and from there overrules my emotions. It picks apart everything everyone says or does to me and finds everything wrong with it.

Overthinking is a skill of creating problems from a problem that did not even exist. The monster does this for me. Conversations I have throughout my day are jotted on a piece of paper for the monster to review and determine what kind of problems we can create. A slight roll of the eyes sends the monster into full panic mode and self-destruction. Every emotion in the human body erupts from within to trigger an emotion-overload button. 

A plastered fake smile is attached to my face so no one can see the monster living in my brain. The distress within my body is well covered up with phony laughs and cliche jokes. No one talks about their monsters, so why should I start now? Stress is created from little situations that can be solved in easy ways. 

The thoughts that I buried earlier that day erupt the minute I get home and I am alone. No one will ever see me cry. Tears stream down my face onto my pillow case into late hours of the night. The next day I only run on four hours of sleep due to the assumptions of life that burden my mind the previous night.

Not quite a purple and fuzzy monster that keeps children up at night but a monster that questions every word said to me. It is not something scary that threatens to attack me but something over the years I have become friends with, even though its claws can leave scratches. 

I have never told anyone about this monster. Sometimes I wonder if other people have monsters. If other people can not control how they respond to others or what their brain thinks. How do they control it? How do they respond to it?

Kids tell their parents to check for the monsters underneath their beds before they go to bed. But can a parent check for a monster in their head before they go to bed?