The Tail of the Monster

In the five unplanned hours I’ve spent on calls with Awab, he mentioned once that he had started a course kind of on self discovery, presented by the author of The Surrender Experiment. as I remember they were nine chapters, online. Awab said he moved through the first few quickly, impatiently, because the material was already familiar to him. and then he reached the end of chapter six, where the instructor said: in the next lecture, we’ll be talking about x. and Awab paused. he told me he knew, instinctively, that what came next was something he wasn’t ready to hear. so he stopped. and he stayed stopped.

I have never sat with someone who runs from themselves the way I do, until I met Awab. but there’s a difference between us: Awab knows he’s running. he can name the avoidance while it’s happening. I couldn’t. I was doing it without knowing, for years, moving through my own life with what calling this experiential avoidance, the unconscious refusal to sit with internal experiences that feel threatening. thoughts, feelings, memories that carry too much weight. you don’t decide to avoid them. you just never go there. it is only in recent months that I’ve understood my own nature well enough to see the pattern for what it was.

What Awab described is something more layered than ordinary avoidance. it isn’t just flinching from a difficult feeling, it’s fearing to even look at what’s underneath. you can tell yourself that the heaviness you carry is just life moving too fast, that you haven’t had time to slow down and reflect . that’s the easier story. but sometimes what lives below isn’t a feeling you missed processing. it’s something you have been actively, deliberately not acknowledging, something you sensed was there and chose, over and over, not to name. s part of the self that accumulates everything you refused to look at, something different. everything we’ve buried because it felt too dangerous or too shameful to hold in the light.

And the strange thing about the Shadow that I call the monster. is that you don’t have to see it fully for it to frighten you. you catch a glimpse, a flash at the darkest hour, a moment where something tries to take its grip on you, late nights, and even that is enough. you’ve only seen the tail of the monster. and yet that alone is terrifying, because the tail tells you the rest of it exists. and somewhere, you know you’ve been feeding it. that it has been there long enough to grow teeth. that it has already been shaping you from the inside, long before you were willing to admit it was there.