Put these patterns in the past...

I see the beast so clearly now, hovering above me, tangible and in a recognizable form. It's wrapping its stickiness around my throat - and I was helping it. It's grabbing me tightly, making me believe it's my friend. But it isn't. It was a thing I created as a child to allow me to imagine a world where I wasn't in pain. But now it has morphed into a harbinger of the very thing it was supposed to shield me from. Conjuring up fantasies no longer shields me from the present, it prevents me from understanding it. It sets me into overdrive, imagining all the ways people can hurt me, not seeing how I am in fact, hurting myself. I am not my emotions. The beast is not my handler. I will break it, before it breaks me.