Yesterday, I told my husband about a horrible thought I had. This week for some reason, I had this image of smashing my aunt’s head against the wall. I could see in my mind’s eye the blood streaming from her forehead and eyes. I could hear the skull bones cracking. I could also see the shock in her face, and she looked at her attacker wanting to know why someone would try to kill her and knowing that there was nothing she could do to defend herself.
It isn’t the first time I have had horrible thoughts. When my mom was still alive, I envisioned her accidentally dropping a cigarette, setting the house on fire, and both her and my aunt burning to death in the house. Yesterday, when my husband was taking a few minutes extra in the grocery store, I imagined him having a heart attack in the store and then I imagined a group of terrorists taking the entire store hostage, while I sat in the parking lot clueless playing a game on my phone. I even imagined a swat team rolling up to the front of the store and only then when I heard the troop filing out of their van would I look up from my game.
The point is I have a horror writer’s imagination. Almost twenty-four seven, it is like a horror movie going on in my mind. When I was younger, I used to think there was something wrong with me and I would try to fight the thoughts. I wanted to make them go away because I wanted to think thoughts that I thought were better. However, now that I am older, I realize that I just need to accept myself the way that I am. Those thoughts are part of me. My mind has dark thoughts. However, they still disturb me. I have trouble killing roaches because I have trouble killing a living thing that big. If I have trouble killing an insect, I don’t think I could easily kill anything. I can’t even watch movies with a lot of violence. It doesn’t make me sick or seem too gross. Watching movies with too much violence makes me sad. I can’t take the violence because I start to think about how much it hurts, and I empathize too much with it. There’s no way that the thoughts in my head are anything like a desire or wish. They are my fear and paranoia. They are all the worst-case scenarios that my OCD can come up with. They are a part of me. God teaches me to accept myself; all of me. So, I do. I use this wonderfully weird imagination to write horror. I love myself and know that God didn’t make a mistake when He made me this way.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
