Say hello to your little demon friend. We all have one. Some of us even name it. It's the nearly permanent part of your conscience that repeatedly and most of the time successfully tears you down, leads you to the stupid decision or tells you you're fat and ugly. What a cute little guy. Here's a shocker: little demon friend is actually your own voice . It doesn't sound like us - the real us, that is. But rather a darker version of us. Some days we just flick it off our shoulder and tell him to stay the hell away. Other days it has the power to fully and totally occupy our thoughts, emotions, body, and brain.

It's as if it has a little calendar based off your mood and feelings. When you're feeling really good, like standing-on-top-of-the-mountain-you-just-rigorously-climbed good or when you reach the top of the steps like Rocky Balboa, that mood is its cue to come out and say, "Actually you suck today! You're not that great and you will hate everything about yourself for about the next week and a half." The timing is truly impeccable.

We spend half our life trying to block our demon friend out. When we finally do, after those priceless high school infused with puberty moments we cringe just thinking about, or freshman year of college when we felt so out of our comfort zone we called mom crying at age 19 (or was that just me?), we ask ourselves, “What's the point? What's the point in exhausting our efforts to diminish our demon from our life?" It's a battle, and everyone's fighting it.

I’m using the term demon as an umbrella term. It’s really a unique thing to all of us. Your demon could be that speech class you dread going to every single day because you stutter and sweat like hell the second you get in-front of the class. It could be that one person who ticks you off more than anything, but you know they deserve your grace and patience, just like everyone else. It could be that pair of jeans that only goes up to your mid thigh and says, “Nope, not today! Try again later, bye.” Basically, anything that brings out the version of you that you don’t even like. Anything that says, “No, you can’t do it." It allows negativity to surface in our oh-so-sensitive brains that subconsciously overthink and over-worry for us. It’s what onsets the crabby moods and blow-ups we pretty much always regret. It sucks.

Everyone has their special, little, personalized demon and we spend a large chunk of life figuring out how to conquer it. That’s just the thing though - part of our happiness in life is overcoming, conquering, and having faith in our selves that we can. Without these battles, whether they be day to day or on a larger scale, we become stagnant. We do not grow. We do not overcome anything. But we know better. We don't have time to let a stranger, whether it be a version of us or not, cloud what we know is right and true.

Meanwhile, our demon is trying to tear us down, when little does he know, he’s really providing fuel to build us up.

So, jokes on you, demon friend. Buh-bye now.